By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Author and Executive Director of Berzin Archives
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.
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