The Namgyal Audio-Visual Archive contains 27 years worth of recordings, totaling more than three thousand hours of teachings of His Holiness Dalai Lama.

In the past the archive has been fortunate enough to receive funding to transfer older tape formats to the new digital formats, and to construct a proper humidity- and temperature-controlled media storage room. These measures have ensured the life and stability of the existing tape media for the time being, but we must now make provisions for the future.

Currently the archive exists as a single copy of media residing in the archive room at Namgyal Monastery. To ensure the safety of the archive for future generations we must now create a backup of the archive. The backup must protect against two distinct threats to the archive media: Individual media failure, and the more drastic complete archive destruction.

The first threat, individual media failure, refers to the instability of the miniDV and DV-SP media the footage is currently stored on. These tapes wear out over time: They have moving parts which can fail, and as a magnetic format, the signal strength of the data will slowly decay until it is unusable. The tapes will eventually begin to fail, there is no question to this. Every tape which fails will result in one hour of teachings lost forever. By creating a duplicate of all tapes we prevent this loss.

The second threat, destruction of the archive, comes in the form of the ever-present danger of fire, earthquake, or any other unforeseeable event which could destroy all or part of the archive. Presently, the archive exists entirely in a single place. If something happens to this building, the whole archive and all the work of the last 27 years is lost. We cannot predict or prevent such a disaster. The only way to protect from it is to create a duplicate of the archive in another building.

To further ensure the safety of the backup we propose to create this not only in an other building, but in a separate geographical location, namely in Delhi. The main logic here is the ever-present threat of earthquake in Dharamshala. If we simply make a duplicate of the archive in another building, this very real threat is still present. But by storing the backup in Delhi, we are protecting the archive from earthquakes or other geographical-specific disasters.

At present the creation of a backup of the archive’s source media is the single most important task the archive can undertake. The source material is the heart of the archive, without the source material the archive’s other taks cannot function, as there will be nothing to edit and release to the public. By creating a backup of the archive we can ensure future generations will be able to benefit from the wisdom contained in these precious teachings.