Project Report
| Sep 4, 2019
Berzin Archives Report: June through August 2019
By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Founder and Author of Berzin Acrhives
Kalachakra Temple, St. Petersburg, Russia
Summer has flown by in the northern hemisphere, but we haven’t only been enjoying the weather! Our dedicated 57-member team has been hard at work in this third quarter of 2019, creating new content and continually perfecting the website. Great progress has been made on our multilingual glossary, and our team has produced over 2600 new translations of articles, subtitle files, and video descriptions into our 21 languages. We are also excited to announce the start of preparation for two new languages: Thai and Korean.
The continual effort by our global team is reflected by our growing user base – both on the Study Buddhism website itself, and on our social media channels. Visits to the website this summer were above expectations, and our YouTube channel is nearing 11,000 subscribers, with analytics showing that users are coming back time and again for the quality content we produce. Furthermore, engagement on our Facebook page is up 6% compared to the year before, and our page now has 32,000 followers. Meanwhile, our efforts in uploading audio content are seeing wonderful results, with SoundCloud listens up 56% compared to the previous quarter. These fantastic figures reflect the hard work and joyous effort of our team, wishing to benefit all beings worldwide.
Here is a more detailed summary of what we have accomplished this summer:
- Translation of 262 articles into our various 21 languages and addition of them to the Study Buddhism website
- Translation of 160 subtitle files into our various languages for our videos
- Transcription of 14 English audio files
- Creation and addition to the website of a Latest Content section in all languages
- Preparation begun of new Korean and Thai sections for the website, with translation of the Interface completed for each
- Creation in our content management system of a Korean section, with Interface and slug transliteration
- Optimization of the Internal Search Engine begun, with separation of search results for each language section
- Of the 2539 English technical terms left in the English glossary after deleting redundant terms, separation of the 1619 main term pages and creation of 920 synonym pages linked to their equivalents on the main term pages
- Edition of the definitions and addition of new definitions completed for 1380 of the 1619 main term pages of the English glossary
- Addition of Romanized Sanskrit equivalents for the main term pages of the glossary, with diacritical marks newly added to all
- Addition of Romanized Tibetan equivalents for the main term pages of the glossary, with Tibetan script newly added to all
- Migration of the old Berzin Archives website and its 3750 audio files to the Study Buddhism server
- Creation of 240 search engine optimized titles and descriptions for the videos currently on the Study Buddhism YouTube channel, and the translation of 2250 of these into our other languages.
- Addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of 13 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, and embedding them in various appropriate articles on the website.
- Edition of 17 videos of an interview with Tsultrim Allione, Buddhist teacher and author, founder of Tara Mandala
- Video recording of an interview with Menri Trizin Rinpoche, Lungtok Dawa Dargye Rinpoche, Head of the Bon Tradition
- Video recording of an interview with Geshe Dorji Damdul, Director of Tibet House, Delhi
- Video recording of an interview with Ringu Tulku, Tibetan Buddhist master of the Kagyu tradition, and founder of the international Buddhist organization, Bodhicharya.
- Video recording of an interview with Dr. Andrey Terentyev, Editor-in-Chief of Buddhism in Russia and the Russian branch of Narthang Publications, author of more than 100 works on Buddhism in Russia, former Researcher at the Leningrad Museum of History of Religions and Atheism
- Video recording of an interview with Dr. Margarita Kozhevnikova, Senior Researcher, Institute of Teacher and Adult Education, Russian Academy of Education, and Coordinator of Human Education in the Third Millennium
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.”
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