Berzin Archives Year End Report 2009
As I am leaving for three weeks in India tomorrow, I am sending you a bit earlier than usual my year-end report. First of all, 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.
Let me share with you what we have accomplished to date. In 2009, we have added our Polish section so that now the website is available in six languages – English, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. The vast part of it is accessible to the blind. In the course of the year, we have had nearly 0.6 million individual persons visiting the site. This represents a 16% increase in visitors since the end of 2008. We now have 70 active team members.
In the last year, the website contents have grown by 17.3%, with the addition of 294 new items, including both articles and audio material. We now have online, spanning our six language sections 1415 articles. In addition, we have 567 audio files. As for further language sections in preparation, we have been continuing our efforts on French and traditional and simplified character Chinese, and have begun work on Arabic and Urdu as the first phase of our Berzin Archives Buddhism and Islam Website Project. The second phase will include Farsi and Turkish. We have also begun preparation of Tamil and Hindi sections. Work in our Mongolian, Italian and Vietnamese divisions is temporarily on pause.
We have also made great progress in transcribing, proofreading and publishing online the unedited transcripts of our audio files. Not only does this make the audio material available for the deaf, but it also makes it accessible to our internal search engine. In addition, we have embedded a stationary audio player in the online transcripts so that visitors can improve their language skills by simultaneously reading and listening to the lectures. Although we have only begun transcribing the non-English portions of our 104 online bilingual audio files, we look forward next year to further work in this area.
Another major area of progress has been our glossary section. During the year, we published online the expanded second edition of our English-Tibetan-Sanskrit, Tibetan-Sanskrit-English, German-Tibetan-Sanskrit-English, and Tibetan-Sanskrit-German-English glossaries, containing 1700 Buddhist technical terms in English. All four glossaries include comprehensive definitions in English and all technical terms in the definitions within the English-Tibetan-Sanskrit glossary have links to their definitions. Moreover, all occurrences of glossary terms in the English articles have popup windows containing their definitions that appear when a reader goes over them with their cursor.
Work is well underway on the next steps in our glossary project. Our technical team is nearly finished developing a comprehensive glossary application that will handle the data for compiling and coordinating the glossaries of all our language sections. When completed, it will enable us to keep easier track of all the stages of work in the preparation of glossaries for not only Buddhist technical terms, but also text titles and proper names appearing on the website. It will also automatically generate online glossaries, so that we can update the glossaries much more frequently and easily.
We have just received permission from Professor Jeffrey Hopkins to include in our glossary tools his equivalent translation terms for our Buddhist technical terminology. We shall include this information not only in our English glossary, but also in our popup window definitions. This will enable readers to correlate what that read on the website with what they have read in the extensive published literature using Professor Hopkins’ terminology.
As a further aid for use of our website as a study resource, all articles in all language sections now provide a list of Pages with Similar Content. Moreover, our technical team is developing several mapping applications that will not only help our individual language teams better coordinate their work, but will also help our visitors better locate further material on specific topics on the website. 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 holiday season and new year.