March 2007 ARP Letter

March 15, 2007

Dear Friends and Supporters of the Audio Recovery Project,

We are approaching the end of the second full year of the Audio Recovery Project. In this letter, I hope to share what we’ve been up to for the last two years, what has gone right, what has gone wrong, and in the end, how you can help us to complete the project in a timely fashion, without anyone suffering the slings and arrows of financial misfortune. This is a long letter, but I think that the ARP donors deserve a full accounting. In the future, more pithy pitches will undoubtedly be sent your way.

In the first year, the main concentration was on enrolling centres in the program, refining our methodology for digitizing and improving the sound quality, obtaining the equipment, and finally getting the whole system up and running. Finetuning the system for copying the CDs was a fairly daunting task. The technical staff, Gordon Kidd and Chris Levy, had to make many adjustments in the equipment we purchased and work with the manufacturers to get the system working up to the standards we had established. After several months of tinkering, we were able to begin making high quality CDs. Both those technosavvy and technophobic, like myself, breathed a sigh of relief. We were actually going to be able to deliver the CDs as promised!

At the end of the first year, the digitizing was proceeding, the sound correction was occurring, our first batches of CDs were being shipped, but things were moving more slowly than we had anticipated. The technical wizard who has designed many of the systems we’re using and is carrying out a great deal of the work, Chris Levy, realized that we could increase the efficiency of the system dramatically. In part, we needed to do this because we had realized that at the rate we were going, three years was easily going to turn into five or six. There was so much more material than we had anticipated and so many more things to be done to correct the sound and create good recordings to send out.

Chris, consulting with Gordon Kidd, James Hoagland, and others, figured out how to bring in four analogue recordings at the same time, when previously the recordings were coming in one at a time. Simple as this sounds, it was an impressive innovation, one that is saving a great deal of time and money. The savings were used to install a sophisticated RAID unit, which Chris put together himself, to house the digital files. RAID is short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. I have no idea what fault tolerance is, but I’m sure it’s important. It may be this: On a RAID, the information is backed-up in several places, and if one drive goes bad, the system can reconstruct the data from the remaining drives, plus it tells you that a drive has gone bad. (It does not actually speak to you, but I think it beeps or turns green or something.) RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers. This is probably good, since most of us computing personally would be seriously RAID-challenged.

So good is the system that Chris developed that Media Matters—a technical consultancy in Manhattan, specializing in archival audio and video material—brought the head of Public Television in Puerto Rico to the Shambhala Archives to learn how our system works. So good is the technician, Chris Levy, that he’s being considered for a job at the Library of Congress at the conclusion of the ARP. The head of Media Matters, Jim Lindner, wrote to thank us:

I would like to offer my sincere congratulations at putting together a very cohesive system for your project – one that will get the job done in a very cost efficient way. I wanted to thank you for your great generosity in sharing your success with me and CPRDP (Public Television Puerto Rico) and very much appreciate your help.

Jim was very impressed by how economical a system we had put together. We have been pinching every penny—absolutely every one—to get the job done for a reasonable, in fact ridiculously reasonable, price.

Last fall, while in Boulder, Colorado to attend a conference on the life and teachings of Chogyam Trungpa at Naropa University, I spent a day at the Naropa Archives. The archivist there shared a lot of information about the audio recovery they did on the poetry archives at Naropa. It’s quite impressive, and they have made the material available on-line. They had quite a large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help with the project. I learned that they spent approximately twice as much as we are spending and they copied about half as many recordings—and they were not including multiple archival CD libraries, as we are, in their budget. Theirs is considered to be an efficient, cost-effective project. Indeed, it is. By that standard, the Shambhala Archives project is a miracle of economy.

As year two has progressed, we’ve been able to pick up the pace, due both to the technical changes noted above as well as to additional help provided by the Archives’ office manager and administrative assistant, Sandra Kipis, and by a student hired through grants from the Young Canada Works program. Production has gone well, and we are now duplicating shipment (insert number).

In Year Three, beginning in April, 2007, in addition to shipping close to 750 CDs to each center, we will be sending you a database containing information about all of the recordings you are receiving. The Shambhala Archives is working with the Chögyam Trungpa Legacy Project on a much more ambitious database project that will include an extensive online catalogue. That won’t be completed this year, but the basic DB will be provided to you. This is one of the main requests we’ve had, and we’re working hard to honor it.

So a lot has been and is still being accomplished, at a very modest price. But….

Here comes the but!

There was no way we could have anticipated that the U. S. dollar would lose such significant value against the Canadian dollar, just at the time that we were conducting the Audio Recovery Project. Originally, we estimated the full cost of the project at around $250,000 Canadian, or $185,000 U.S at the then-current rate of exchange.. Today, $185,000 US is worth just $217,000 Canadian, and since two-thirds of the ARP centers are in the United States or paying in US dollars, their decline in value reduced our income for the project by close to $25,000. This is now an anticipated deficit in year three of the project.

Two other things affected the budget to actual: shipping and schedule. Not including shipping charges in our budgeting was my fault. I just forgot to include shipping when I made up the budget, and it’s a very significant expense. We have asked centers to reimburse us for ARP shipping charges but many have not responded in a….timely fashion. This has added another $5,000 to the deficit.

Finally, we did not anticipate the length of the recordings, especially the early recordings, many of which are 90 to 120 minutes long. That man could talk, when he chose to! We didn’t accurately count all the events in advance. I know that sounds lame, but we had a number of recordings that had not been fully “accessioned” or catalogued in any way when we started the project. Somewhere between 300 and 600 new recordings have popped up. Although we’re only sending 1,500 CDs to each center – only – we have more than 2,500 events to digitize as part of the project. We might go beyond 3,000 recordings when we include special collections such as the translation meetings that the Vidyadhara had with the Nalanda Translation Committee and events involving the Dorje Kasung. As a result, the project will continue for four to six months beyond the three years we anticipated. This will add another $10,000 to $15,000 to the deficit.

All together, based on the original income projections, we will be short about $40,000 to $45,000. That’s less than 20% of the total, and considering the currency shift, it’s impressively small. But quite real!

We are looking at our expenses, in the hope that we can cut the deficit by cutting fat out of the budget. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much fat. Very very little fat. Almost no fat. In fact, the staff is already working for low wages, and the department is charging almost no overhead. We can’t send you wooden CDs, so to speak. So we have to raise additional funds to cover the deficit and complete the project on time.

We hope to fund part of the deficit through new recordings that we will be making available to individuals and centers in the coming year. Those of you who are connected to our major contributing ARP centers will already have these recordings. Many other Shambhala Centers and individuals will now be able to access seminars and talks by the Vidyadhara, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In some cases, we can offer audio CDs together with books based on the material and a syllabus, so that centers will be able to offer a new course based on ARP material.

We have a number of other strategies, but additionally, we are hoping that many of our ARP subscribers will be able to help, which could include making an additional donation to the project. There are several ways you can help:

1) Please pay on time and please let us know if you will have difficulty meeting your obligation to ARP.
2) Please pay your shipping charges.
3) Hold an ARP fundraiser at your centre to help cover our deficit. This is the 20th anniversary of the Parinirvana of the Vidyadhara. It’s a powerful time to celebrate him and invite the community to support the wonderful audio legacy of his teachings.
4) If you can send us between $500 and $1,000 in addition to the amount you have already committed to, that would be a huge help. If twenty centers can raise and contribute $1,000, that will handle half of the deficit.


Lots of projects need financial assistance and regularly ask for our help. Undoubtedly, your center has many needs as well. We hope you will nevertheless consider additional support for the Audio Recovery Project, not just because we are delivering excellent value—a priceless library of CDs—but also because of the great importance of this project.

And finally, thank you for your ongoing support of the Audio Recovery Project. Because of your support, we can honor a direct request from Chögyam Trungpa, who told his Board of Directors: “Please save the tapes. Please save my voice.” He made that request around 1985. More than twenty years later, we will be able to say, “Mission accomplished, Sir.”

I have faith now that, although the globe may warm, the tides may rise in Halifax, and the winds may howl in Boulder, with all of these libraries of his audio teachings preserving his teachings around the world, the voice of the Vidyadhara will be with us for many generations. What you are supporting and being given is a precious library. I hope you’ll treat it that way—consider installing the library it in your shrine room as a relic of the speech of the Vidyadhara.

We are almost there. A few more steps, a few more digital bits and bytes, a few more dollars. Please help if you can. If you’d like to discuss any aspect of the Audio Recovery Project, please feel free to e-mail me at cgimian@suchns.com.

Thank you,

Carolyn Rose Gimian
Director Emeritus
Shambhala Archives