By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Author and Executive Director of Berzin Archives
With your kind ongoing support, we have continued to make great progress with the Berzin Archives project (www.berzinarchives.com). During the last three months we have added online our sixteenth and seventeenth language sections: Mongolian and Japanese. The statistics and details of what we have accomplished during these months are attached to this report.
We have continued preparation of the next language sections for the web site: Tibetan and Hindi, and have begun preparation of a Persian section. We have been able to secure a Persian team as the direct outcome of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s visit to the Roshan Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. There he delivered “The Anwar Sadat Lecture for Peace” and participated in “A Meeting of Two Oceans: Dialogue on Sufism and Buddhism.” Transcripts of both lectures are now available on our web site: http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/approaching_buddhism/world_today/anwar_sadat_lecture_for_peace.html and http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/study/islam/general/meeting_of_two_oceans.html.
Our web developer has constructed these three next language sections and programmed our content management system to handle the fonts for these scripts and display them on all browsers and operating systems. Our technical team is currently developing a program to optimize treatment of all the non-Roman scripts of the site.
Our Arabic team has completed work on an Arabic-English glossary with Arabic translations of the definitions of the terms and this is newly online. As with the English section, pop-up windows with the definitions of these terms appear in the Arabic articles when the reader passes the cursor over the terms.
Work is continuing strongly on the transcription of the audio files of my weekly courses. We have now completed transcribing and proofreading 185 of the 379 audio files currently online. In preparation for also putting these transcripts online, once they have been copyedited, our web developer has integrated these audio files from their previous podcast status into our content management system and reformatted them accordingly.
In addition, our web developer has upgraded our content management system to the latest version and optimized many of its features to increase efficiency. We have also migrated the web site to a larger main server, added a second backup server, and expanded our security measures. With this increased efficiency, we hope to make even more of the “Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”
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