Tim's Website Design Portfolio
The Phiroz
Mehta Trust

The Phiroz Mehta Trust promotes the study of the world's great religions, and preserves the works of the late Phiroz Mehta. The Trust holds over 900 recorded talks made by Phiroz and also houses his extensive library of religious literature.

A major project was carried out by CASS Limited in 2002 to archive and catalogue Phiroz's talks, preserving them for the future and making them available to the public on the Internet and CD for the first time.

In 2010 the Trust website was renamed "Being Truly Human" and redesigned using AJAX technology and Flash so that visitors can listen to talks online while they browse. They can also download talks for offline listening in MP3 format.

The home page

The opportunity was also taken to complete the online archive of Trust Newsletters going back to 1991, and rationalise the URL scheme to improve search engine access.

Part of the Talk Archive System

Creating the Archive

Phiroz's talks were recorded live onto reel-to-reel or cassette tapes, which have, over time, deteriorated.

The talks were archived to MiniDiscs, then later copied onto computers where they were digitally enhanced to remove noise and then stored on hard disks, DAT, and CD media.

Multiple copies of the CD archive have been produced, two of which are now housed at the Philosophical Society and in the Library at the University of California.

The project was managed using the Talk Archive System database which I developed to run on the CASS Intranet during the processing of the talks.