THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS AN UPDATE ON THE STATUS OF OUR CURRENT TRANSCRIPTION PROJECT AND INCLUDES A RECENT LETTER FROM ACHARYADEVA IN APPRECIATION OF OUR SERVICE.

Dear devotees,

Please accept my humble obeisances.
All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

I hope this email finds you after a glorious Janmastami & Srila Prabhupada Appearance Day celebration! I wanted to take a moment to address everyone in the Religions of India Transcription Team.

First, I want to thank everyone for their hard work and dedicated service. Everyone by now is fully aware that transcription service, although intimate and inspiring, can also be tedious and exhausting after several hours sitting in front of the computer. This project has been especially daunting with over 80 lectures needing to be transcribed, checked, and re-checked. I recently gave Hridayananda das Goswami an update on the project and, in response, he requested that I share the following letter with you all:

My Dear Devotees,
Please accept my blessings. Jaya Srila Prabhupada.

Please know that I am deeply grateful to each and every one of you for your outstanding selfless service in transcribing my words. I know very well that all of you have busy lives, and your dedication to Prabhupada’s mission, and to helping me, gives me great encouragement to do even more for Prabhupada.

May Krishna bless you in every way!

With best wishes,
Hridayananda das Goswami
August 30, 2013

Second, I wanted to explain that in Jenya’s absence since starting school, I will be filling in as the project manager. As a dozen or so new devotees have joined our team, I wanted to answer several questions that have come up repeatedly.

• On the first page of your edited transcript file, please list the semester, lecture #, and lecture title.
  ex. Fall Semester, Lecture 4, The Indo-European Issue
• For inaudible text, use bracketing and note the time. For example:
  [unclear, 0:14:58]
  [Sanskrit unknown, 0:15:16]
  [inaudible student question, 0:20:16]
• I decided to rename this service as “checking-for-accuracy” as opposed to “editing” in order to make it very clear that our goal is to render the transcripts as literal as possible. These transcripts should be 100% identical to the original spoken lecture.

Third, although we have made tremendous progress, we still have a lot of service in front of us. The following is an update on the status of our ROI transcription project:

55 lectures have been transcribed
40 lectures have been edited-checked

25 lectures needing to be transcribed
40 lectures needing to be edited-checked

Thus, we now need your help more than ever. Please finish your current assignments and take on more! If we can secure commitments from ten devotees to edit two transcripts per week, the project will be finished within the next three weeks. WE CAN DO IT!!!

Again, thank you, everyone, for contributing to this project. If we are not already in contact, please inquire for a new assignment.

Hare Krishna!
Your servant,
Ali Krishna dd