Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

Another three months have passed of intense work on the Study Buddhism project of Berzin Archives by our dedicated 55-member team. During this second quarter of 2019, we have started to work on our multilingual glossary, containing definitions of thousands of terms in six languages Furthermore, we have produced nearly 800 new translations of articles and subtitle files into our 21 languages, and uploaded hundreds of audio files to our SoundCloud channel. We have also spent considerable time in optimizing the website, to ensure that our textual and visual content loads faster for everyone, everywhere.

Our hard work is paying off, for both the website and its social media channels. Visits to the website have grown steadily, and people are spending longer on the site. Our Facebook engagement is up 9% compared to the same period last year, and on YouTube, we surpassed half a million views, with almost 10,000 subscribers. But it is our SoundCloud figures that are truly impressive: in just the first five months of the year, we have already had 130,000 plays of our audio material, which is 200% of what we had during the whole of 2018. These fantastic figures reflect the hard work and joyous effort of our team, wishing to benefit all beings.

Here is a more detailed summary of what we have accomplished this spring:

• Translation of 262 articles into our various 21 languages and addition of them to the Study Buddhism website
• Translation of 561 subtitle files into our various languages for our videos
• Addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of 20 videos of an interview with Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, renowned teacher and author, and embedding them in appropriate articles on the website
• Addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of 8 videos of an interview with Drikung Chetsang Rinpoche, spiritual head of the Drikung Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism, and embedding them in appropriate articles on the website
• Editing of 14 videos of an interview with Dr. Robert Thurman, President of Tibet House USA and Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University
• Video recording of an interview with Jhado Rinpoche, Abbot Emeritus of H.H. the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery and present Abbot of Gyuto Tantric Monastic University
• Video recording of new educational videos with Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche II
• Audio recording and addition on the Study Buddhism SoundCloud channel of 3 lectures on the Buddhist Tenet Systems by Dr. Alexander Berzin
• Audio and video recording in Moscow, Russia, of a 7-lecture seminar on “The Uniqueness of Tsongkhapa’s Presentation of the Prasangika View”
• Import of 1645 audio files from the SoundCloud channel and embedding them in the corresponding transcriptions on the website
• Transcription of 28 English audio files
• Creation of individual pages for each term in the multilingual Study Buddhism glossary (3278 English, 1465 Tibetan, 923 German, 237 Arabic, 199 French, and 104 Russian terms) and addition of them to the website
• Addition of initial letter filters in each language glossary
• Algorithm generation of synonyms, related terms and related articles for each glossary term
• Creation of administrative interface for editing the entries for each term in the English glossary
• Editing of the definitions and synonyms and addition of new definitions for 495 terms in the English glossary
• Deletion of 590 redundant terms from the English glossary
• Improvement of site performance with page cache
• Auto-generation of the sitemap each day
• Optimization of memory/space usage on the hosting server
• Upgrading the uploading of images on the website

All of this hard work is made possible by your continuing generous support. Together, we shall “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”

Links:

• Study Buddhism website of the Berzin Archives
• Study Buddhism on Facebook
• Study Buddhism on YouTube