Concerns about the Bhaktivedanta Archives
BY: PRATYATOSA DASA
Feb 21, USA (SUN) — Concerning Ekanatha Prabhu's recent article, "Part II: Setting the Record Straight on Srila Prabhupada's Audio", here are some of my concerns about the Archives:
1. Selling the VedaBase to devotees for hundreds of dollars when it only costs a few pennies to make a copy of one CD-ROM.
I was living at ISKCON NY on Henry Street in Brooklyn in 1971-72 when devotees complained to Srila Prabhupada that ISKCON Press was charging exorbitant prices to devotees for goods and services. Srila Prabhupada's reply was that devotees should sell to other devotees for 10% above cost. That means that if it costs you $1.00 per copy of the VedaBase, then you should sell it to devotees for $1.10!
2. Moving the Archives to a hot, humid climate.
Wouldn't it make more sense to move it to a cool, dry climate where you don't have to spend a fortune on air conditioning to preserve it? Is Srila Prabhupada's priceless legacy even being preserved properly? It would also be better to locate the Archives in a small town so that renounced, nonsalaried brahmacaris and vanaprashas could help out without having to be burdened with maintaining a house, a car, a septic system, a well, etc.
3. Editing the tapes to make them fit on C-60 cassettes when high quality, low priced cassettes of almost any possible length (catering to Christian ministries) were readily available.
When I was in charge of the Bhaktivedanta Tape Ministry, the thought of editing Srila Prabhupada's lectures in any way never even crossed my mind! When Krsnakanti Prabhu asked Srila Prabhupada whether or not he could edit some of his lectures for use on his radio show, Srila Prabhupada emphatically stated that his lectures should be distributed unedited or not at all!
4. Simply ignoring audio tapes whose time and/or place of origin is unknown because they don't fit in with the Archives' ill-conceived numbering system.
Wouldn't it make more sense to simply give each tape a serial number and then identify whatever is extracted from a particular tape by using the serial number plus the starting and ending times? Your numbering system is based upon the numbering system that I started in 1971, but I always knew the time and place of the recordings. Such a numbering system doesn't make any sense when some of the recordings are of unknown origin.
5. Simply ignoring tapes which are of low quality.
This is a symptom of the Archives' profit motivated consciousness. "If it's too much trouble, and it's not going to significantly increase profits, then forget it."
The obvious solution is to immediately begin converting all of Srila Prabhupada's tapes to a high quality, lossless digital format such as FLAC in such a way that even an expert can't tell the difference between the original and the copy when doing an "AB test."
Then the FLAC copies should immediately, one-be-one, be published on the Internet, so that devotees all over the world could help to preserve them by adding them to their private collections, and so that devotees all over the world could try their hand at making the recordings more intelligible.
This sort of thing is being done with subtitles for popular movies. If you go to SubScene.com, you will see that volunteers from all over the world are working cooperatively to create subtitles for Hollywood blockbusters in hundreds of different languages! If the karmis can work cooperatively in this way, then why can't we do something similar for Srila Prabhupada?
