The Bhaktivedanta Vedabase Computer Program

THE FRONT DOOR of the Bhaktivedanta Archives flies open, and the blur of a sari swooshes past me heading for Ekanātha Dāsa’s office. Mamatā Devī Dāsī slams a transcript on his desk.

“I think I typed this before. It sounds familiar, and I just spent four hours typing it again!”

As it turned out, she was often right. As discreetly as possible, I would extricate myself to tend to a sudden pressing matter in my studio, leaving Ekanātha to quell the fires of frustration.

The memory of such scenes brings nostalgia. In the early 1980s the transcribing of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s recordings was in full swing. There were hundreds of unmarked recordings, along with copies or parts of copies acquired from the devotees after Śrīla Prabhupāda’s passing. Ekanātha, who had joined the Archives in May 1978, performed the mighty and time-consuming task of transferring everything to cassette tapes for typing and cataloging. While the transfers were relatively easy, he quickly ran into the problem of not being able to cross-reference the programs without a great deal of detective work.

This need for an archival tool to help identify, cross-reference, and correlate all the recordings was a major impetus for the development of the Bhaktivedanta VedaBase. This state-of-the-art text-retrieval program allows one to search all the thousands of lectures, morning walks, and conversations by keying in a few words or a word string. Now I can immediately check whether a tape has been transcribed, and determine whether the tape is an original or a copy.

Technology for Kṛṣṅa

Śrīla Prabhupāda taught that modern technology was good only if dovetailed in Kṛṣṅa’s service. With this guiding principle, we have worked countless hours developing this program for devotees and scholars. I find the program invaluable for my archival work, and just as important, it has become my oracle in answering daily personal questions, regardless how mundane they may seem.

In 1987, with the advent of affordable and practical personal computers, we began digitizing transcripts of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s recordings. Ādi-purāṅa Dāsa, from New Zealand, commuted daily from Berkeley (where he lived in a friend’s garage) to a computer bureau in downtown San Francisco, appropriately named “Krishna Copy.” It was owned by an Indian businessman, Sanjaya, who later became an ISKCON life member. Ādi-purāṅa would help Sanjaya’s customers use the Kurzweil scanner (then a $50,000 machine), and in return, Sanjaya would allow Ādi-purāṅa to use the scanner for transcendental purposes. In this way, single-handedly, Ādi-purāṅa scanned forty thousand pages of transcripts and around fifty volumes of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books. These scanned files are the core of the Bhaktivedanta VedaBase. (It is interesting to note that the word ādi-purāṅa means the “original, or first, history.”)

In 1990, devotees from the Bhaktivedanta Archives attended the computer industry’s annual Comdex convention to look for computer search programs. In a small nondescript booth, they came across the start-up company Folio Corporation. Their program, Folio Views, was by far the best in the industry at the time, and has remained so, even though the company has been bought and sold since. In 1991 we purchased the program, and later that year the Bhaktivedanta Electronic Library, running under DOS, was published. In 1995 we released a Windows and Macintosh version and named it Bhaktivedanta VedaBase. Other versions have been released since, with many additions and new features.

Technological Cornerstone

More direct evidence of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s life and works has been preserved than that of Jesus, Mohammed, and certainly Lord Caitanya Himself. Śrīla Prabhupāda’s life and accomplishments are a fascinating period of Vaiṣṅava history. His achievements as a religious leader are undeniable, and they are now being enshrined within the digital technology of the twenty-first century. With the passage of twenty-five years since Prabhupāda’s departure, the intensity and scope of his personal power and achievements will begin to fade unless kept alive in the memory of his followers, and in turn become part of our verbal heritage. The Bhaktivedanta VedaBase is the technological cornerstone of this great record. It is rapidly becoming the canon of his ISKCON society.

The latest Bhaktivedanta VedaBase, version 2008.1, commemorates the Silver Jubilee. It is the most complete presentation of the direct utterances and writings of Śrīla Prabhupāda. While the Bhaktivedanta VedaBase includes other Vaiṣṅava authors and publications, its core will always remain the direct teachings of Śrīla Prabhupāda.

All modern archives are increasing their use of digitization to connect with the public. We hope to develop the Bhaktivedanta VedaBase into a virtual archive that can be set up on any personal computer. Such an archive would allow access to all the materials of the Bhaktivedanta Archives, including images of all the letters, manuscripts and other documents, as well as the enormous audio, video, and photo collections.