Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

During the last three months, we completed the final preparatory steps and put online our twenty-first language section, West Punjabi. This now completes fulfilling His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s wish to reach out to the Muslim community in their own languages and share with them his message of religious harmony and basic human values

Our main focus, however, during these months has been on creating an intranet system for the internal use of our 130-member team to facilitate our workflow management. Once completed and implemented, the intranet will enable us to process more efficiently all that will be involved with the preparation and maintenance of the next version (3.0) of the Berzin Archives website.

So far, we have completed automating the procedures for venting and accepting new volunteers. Having interviewed the editors of our most active language sections to learn of the strong and weak points of our present system, we have narrowed down the choice of intranet platforms that can meet our requirements. We need a project management tool for document exchange, recordkeeping, team communication, automated invoices, and automatic easy-to-automate reports. The intranet platform must also be able to incorporate the extensive list of answers to questions regarding words and passages in the website articles as well as the documentation found presently in our internal wiki and must also be able to function as a berzinarchives email server. Shortly, we shall enter our data into the most promising platform and test it with one of our language teams, tweaking the system in accord with their experience or choosing another platform to test in case this first choice proves inadequate.

In addition, also based on the user survey we conducted within our language teams, we are starting to compile the modifications we will need for improving the usability of our present glossary tool. The glossary tool is an extensive 21-language database compiled and used by the translators and editors of our various teams for maintaining consistency of terminology and spelling of proper names. It also automatically generates the online glossaries found on our website.

As you can see, we are methodically laying the foundation and building the structures that will enable us to meet the growing needs of the users of our Berzin Archives website so that we can continue to make the wisdom of Tibet available to all. Thank you for your continuing support that makes this all possible.

Links:

• The Berzin Archives website

• Berzn Archives Statistics June - August 2014 (DOCX)

Work on expanding the content of the various language sections of the Berzin Archives website has been continuing at a fast rate over these last three months. We have put online our twentieth language section, Persian, and have completed translating and editing all the material necessary for starting our next language section, West Punjabi. The final steps for putting this section online will now begin.

Our project developer and web analyst has now moved to Berlin and we have added a technical writer to our Berlin-based staff. With this expanded technical team, we have begun making an in-depth analysis of our present work-flow protocols and compiling a handbook containing detailed documentation of all the procedures involved. This is in preparation for increasing the efficiency of our web management system and for choosing a computer data base that might automate some of these processes. The aim is to free me of some of the administrative and managerial functions I now perform so that I can focus more on expanding the English content of the website.

As part of the planning phase for the upgrade version of the website, we have continued with user research and analytics through our online survey for improving its usability. We have also undertaken research and analysis of other similar websites to ascertain their strong and weak points, also for helping to optimize the usability of the upgrade version.

On May 14, I met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Frankfurt and reported the progress that has been made on the website project. I then outlined the plans for the upgrade version that will transform the website into an interactive educational tool, offering massive open online courses (MOOC) in a variety of languages. His Holiness was extremely supportive and advised on further topics to include on the website.

The Tibetan tradition holds a vast treasure of knowledge, especially concerning the workings of the mind and emotions. As the guardian of this treasure, His Holiness the Dalai Lama always stresses the importance of sharing this knowledge with the world through educational programs. When combined with the findings of modern science, the wisdom of Tibet can contribute great benefit to the world. With your ongoing support, we can continue to play a role in fulfilling the promise of this enlightened vision.

Links:

• Berzin Archives website

• Berzin Archives Statistics March - May 2014 (DOCX)