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SALT LAKE CITY -- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has updated a website that features materials related to church founder Joseph Smith.
The updated site, www.josephsmithpapers.org, debuted at the annual Mormon History Association conference in St. George last week.
Some of these documents have never before been available to the public, while others were available only in various archives and libraries around the world.
The site indicates that new offerings include:
- Minute Book 2 (sometimes known as the Far West Record), which contains the minutes of church meetings held in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois from 1830 to 1844.
- More than 100 letters, discourses, newspaper editorials, minutes, revelations, and other documents mainly dating from 1836 to 1838.
- More than 150 biographical sketches.
The church said in a news release that the website will eventually contain about 2,500 documents used by the Joseph Smith Papers project. It is intended to be a definitive collection of records related to the life and work of Joseph Smith and early Mormonism.
"There is a power with these documents. There is something magical when you find the original, and now we have the ability to release these images and transcriptions and our scholarship to the great wide world," said Jeffrey Walker, the project's assistant managing editor.
"The goal is to take all that rich fabric of Joseph Smith's world and use technology to allow it to be looked at from the entire world," Walker said.
The website allows users to browse the documents by category, such as journals, revelations or administrative documents, and to search by keyword, person or location.
In addition to the website, the project will print 20 physical books.
Similar projects exist for several of America's founding fathers, but the Joseph Smith Papers is the first of its kind to make all of materials available for free on the Internet.
New at FamilySearch.org
For family history enthusiasts, the church has launched a new section on its FamilySearch.org website called FamilySearch TechTips.
TechTips is designed to introduce site users to technologies that will "help them climb their family tree."
Visitors to FamilySearch TechTips can read about a variety of subjects, such as how to store photographs for the long term, what mobile applications are available for family historians, how to share files and how to scan images.
The site also contains guides to help users accomplish a technology-related task, like how to join an online research community and why.
The new section of the site is billed as a community effort -- a cross between a blog and an online technology magazine. Anyone can contribute articles and share their personal experiences.
(Photo: Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.)
