The Shambhala Archives’ Video Holdings

The Shambhala Archives houses more than 2,500 video tapes that date from 1974 to the present. Further accruals from Shambhala International are ongoing. The history of the Shambhala Archives’ video collection parallels fairly closely that of our audio collection. One significant difference, however, are the approximately 300 video recordings in the Video Recovery project . The majority of these tapes were recorded in the 1970s under the auspices of the Naropa Institute, with the help of a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. Others were recorded and donated by several of Chögyam Trungpa’s students. The focus is consistently on recording the teachings of Trungpa Rinpoche and the activities of the organizations that he established. The tapes were all recorded on the exceedingly fragile black and white 1/2 inch open reel video format, and had been stored in less than ideal conditions; as such, they were prime candidates for rehabilitation.

The Video Recovery Project

Allen Ginsberg speaking at a Naropa Institute poetry symposium in the early 1970s  In the early 1980s, the Naropa Institute was about to discard the apparently useless, unplayable 1/2 in open reel videos in its possession, which numbered approximately 250. After consideration, however, the videos were turned over to Vajradhatu Recordings (now Kalapa Recordings) for storage. At this time, volunteers cleaned, packed, and inventoried the video recordings, and Vajradhatu Recordings stored them until 1988. Following the Vajradhatu Buddhist Church's move from Boulder, Colorado to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the establishment of a formal Vajradhatu Archives (now Shambhala Archives), the recordings were housed in the climate controlled vaults of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia to stabilize their fragile condition. At this point the reels were reboxed and a new inventory was prepared by the Shambhala Achieves. More than 200 have now been remastered. There exists a finding aid with fonds level descriptions of the materials in the Video Recovery Project.

See this abstract of an article written by two of our staff on the Video Recovery Project . Or read the technical paper itself.
 
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