By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Author and Executive Director of Berzin Archives
Work on our Berzin Archives web site has been proceeding at a fast rate. During the last three months, we have added online our eighteenth and nineteenth language sections: Hindi and Tibetan. The addition of these new sections helps us to fulfill two great wishes of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. These are to repay the kindness of India to have transmitted the Buddhist teachings to Tibet, and to make available the Buddhist teachings to the widespread Tibetan exile community and help preserve the Tibetan language among them.
The Persian section is in the final stages of web production and within a few weeks should come online. As a growing number of young people in Iran wish to broaden their knowledge and contact with the wider world, we hope that by bringing them the Dalai Lama’s message of religious harmony and peace, it will be of benefit to the larger Iranian society. Work on the Western Punjabi section is also coming along nicely and recently we started work on a Korean section – language number 22! Each year, a growing number of Koreans have been visiting Dharamsala in India to receive special teachings from the Dalai Lama. This section will bring His teachings to an even greater number of interested people in Korea.
An itemized list of the work that we have accomplished during these three months is attached to this report.
During these three months, we also have put online our Arabic glossary and implemented the pop-up window feature to provide definitions in Arabic for the Buddhist terms in the online Arabic articles. This will help clarify the material for those for whom the material of the website is all new. To organize more efficient use of our web glossary tool so that we can provide similar online glossaries and the pop-up window feature for our other web-site languages, we have recently hired a web glossary coordinator.
The preliminary findings from the diagnostics, analytics, and user questionnaire we asked our Facebook followers to fill out have provided good insights for helping us prepare the new 3.0 version of the website. Based on our findings, and in consultation with an information architect, we are now asking users of the most frequented language sections of the web site – English, Spanish, German and Russian – to help us with a survey of how they use the web site, its strong and weak points, and their suggestions for improvements and new features. Based on analysis of the data collected, we will be able to design improved layouts of the website for further user testing.
With your continuing help, we shall make even greater advances in sharing the wisdom of Tibet to the world.
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