First mad props to the elves at Yeshiva University for collecting and curating 100, 000 shiurim at their almost excellent site YUTORAH.com. The milestone was reached this week.
The growth of YUTorah has been exponential,” said Rabbi Robert Shur, director of YUTorah since 2007. “What started in 2004 with a little over 1,000shiurim grew to 10,000 about two and a half years later. It took another five years to get to 50,000, with the second 50,000 taking less than three years.”The problem is, the site would be so much better and so much more valuable with one simple, easy not-terribly expensive change. Convert the spoken shiurim to transcripts. Why do this? So many reasons:
1) You can search transcripts by keywords
2) You can skim a transcript in minutes, without having to sit through the nudnik questions and meanderings that are a part of nearly every YUTORAH.com lecture
3) Transcripts are easier to cite (you can quickly cut and paste the part you need, without having to listen to the passage 20 times)
4) It would make my life much easier. Seriously. I can't tell you how many audio shiurim I've sat through only to discover that the lecture wasn't going to address the main question I had in mind. Again, you can SKIM a transcript; you can't do that with an audio file.
So please, YU? Can you get this done?
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