Decades of teachings, findable in seconds.
Your teacher spoke for forty years. It’s on cassettes, hard drives, cloud folders, and a volunteer’s spreadsheet. Living Archive turns it into a library where every talk is transcribed, searchable by phrase, and playable from the exact moment, with curators deciding what the world sees.
Try it: a sample archive
Search a sample library of public-domain talks, then click any result to hear it from that exact moment. Imagine this with your own forty years of recordings.
Pick a result to listen from that exact moment.
Loading the sample archive…
Sample recordings: public-domain LibriVox readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Seneca, and James Allen, streamed from the Internet Archive. Transcripts generated automatically and left unedited, as a curator would first see them.
What your archive becomes
Search every word
Find the talk on forgiveness from 1994 by a phrase someone half-remembers.
Play from the moment
Every result opens the recording at the exact second the words were spoken.
Every format, one library
Cassettes, DATs, video, slides, scans, and workbooks, linked to the retreat or program they belong to.
Curators decide
Nothing is published until a curator approves it. Private by default; originals never altered.
Members and donors
Public, member-only, and private collections, with access you control.
Start with 25 recordings
The Pilot gives your board and donors a working library to explore before you commit to the full collection.
Pilot: First 25
From $3,500
25 recordings transcribed and tagged, with search, a private member site, and the curator review workflow.
Collection
Quoted by hours of media
Up to 500 hours of media plus documents: catalogue reconstruction, editions, public and private collections, member and donor access.
Care plan
From $400/mo
Hosting, new recordings added monthly, backups, and search tuning.
Retreat media add-on
Quoted per event
Session playback, cue sheets, and live AV support for retreats and events.
- Built for organizations with 20+ years of recorded talks
- Works from tapes, drives, video, slides, and scans
- Curator review before anything is published
- Your library stays yours, exportable at any time
Tell us about your archive
Roughly how many hours, what formats, and what you’d most like people to be able to find.
Our recordings are on old tapes and hard drives. Is that a problem?
No, that’s the usual starting point. We work from whatever exists: cassettes, DAT, MiniDisc, video, drives, and cloud folders. Originals are never altered.
Who sees the archive?
Whoever you decide. Everything starts private. Curators choose what becomes member-only or public, talk by talk.
How accurate are the transcripts?
Very good on clear recordings, and every transcript is marked as a draft until a curator reviews it. Names and specialized terms are corrected from a glossary you approve.
How do we pay for it?
Many organizations fund the archive through a legacy or anniversary campaign. The Pilot is priced so you can show donors a working library before asking for the full collection.