Berzin Archives Year End Report 2011

At the start of a new year, I want to thank every one of you who has helped contribute to the continuing growth and success of the Berzin Archives project. Through your hard work and support, we have continued to be the largest provider of authentic, free-of-charge information about Tibetan Buddhism and culture on the Internet.

In December, we celebrated our 10th anniversary online by passing a great milestone. For the first time, we received over one million visitors in a year! They came from 222 countries and territories, almost the entire world. In addition, we published our Indonesian and simplified and traditional character Chinese sections online. Now, the website is available in 12 languages, with all of them complete with internal search engines and almost totally accessible to the blind.

This past year, 2.65 million items were read (86.5%) or listened to (13.5%) on the website. This represents a 29.7% increase in visitors and an 18.7% increase in items accessed since the end of 2010. The main sources of our visitors have been USA (25.3%), Russia (11.6%), Germany (9.0%), Brazil (5.6%), Great Britain (4.0%), and China (3.3%). For the fifth year in a row, the visitors from China have accessed the largest number of items per visit (3.90), followed this year by Taiwan (3.86), Hong Kong (3.13), and Russia (3.06).

In the last year, through the tireless work of our 75 active team members, the website contents have grown by 18.6%, with the addition of 695 new items (575 written articles and audio transcripts, and 120 audio files). The website now contains 2746 written items and 823 audio files.

During the year, we moved the website to a larger server and backup server to accommodate our increased traffic and volume of material. We also began work on our future Vietnamese and Tibetan sections and resumed work on our Italian section. We hope to be able to resume work on our Mongolian section as well during the coming months.

Not everything that has been done this past year is online yet. Translations need to be edited and edited versions of unpublished material in my archives need to be copyedited. New audio files need to be not only edited but, if bilingual, an English only version needs to be separated out. New audio transcripts need to be proofread and copyedited, especially so that we can meet the needs of our deaf visitors. We have made great progress in all these areas, but more is left to be done. We have 417 articles translated into our various languages that are in various stages of preparation, 29 audio files needing editing and possible separation of an English only version, 248 unedited audio files of weekly classes separated into English and bilingual English-German files ready to go online, 150 audio files needing transcribing, 318 audio transcripts needing proofreading and 130 proofread audio transcripts needing copyediting. There are many more exciting plans that we have in mind and, of course, still only about one-third of the English material in my archives has been worked on.

To maintain the website and sustain work on the Berzin Archives project not only for the next year, but, more importantly, on a secure long-term basis, will require considerable personnel and financial resources. We are continuing our efforts to find this much needed support; but, with your continuing help, I am confident that we will succeed in fulfilling the hopes of so many.

Thank you once more and I wish you all a healthy and happy new year.