Selected Collections Review

Mormon History: 1830 to 1839

Selected Collections Review

Selected Collections from the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a two-volume set of DVDs (74 total) published by BYU Press. Edited and produced under the direction of Richard E. Turley Jr., managing director of the church's Family and Church History Department.
General information
Scope		An enormous collection of digitally reproduced documents from the LDS Church Archives, including the Joseph Smith papers, Kirtland high council minutes, revelation manuscripts, Brigham Young letterbooks, Joseph F. Smith diaries, letterbooks, and incoming correspondence. For a complete list, see Selected Collections Alphabetically.
Images		Not searchable—images only.
Blackouts		Some documents and portions of douments are blacked out §.
Price		Current price is $999 (down from the initial $1,299) or $549 for just one volume. See BYU Studies.
Privacy, copyright, and public domain		Publication of these documents is a stunning reversal of church policy which has barred access to many collections, even to faithful LDS scholars, for over two decades. That the collections were released at the very end of 2002, suggests changes in copyright laws may have had something to do it. As in 1890, the "law of the land" seems to have produced a providential change of policy. The next major event will be the hard copy publication of the complete Joseph Smith papers in 30+ volumes beginning, I understand by 2005. Camelot rocks! (as my colleagues at work would say).
Blackouts
		Understandably, the church is concerned about the release of some documents and portions of others. These items are blacked out on the CDs (the originals have not been damaged).
		The printed documentation, under the name of Richard E. Turley Jr., explains:
	¶	[5] This publication has been made possible, to a large extent, by the careful balancing of factors that have stood as barriers in the past to distribution of materials from the Church Archives. These fators have previously been describged in the general introduction to The Journals of George Q. Cannon series:
	¶	Preparing the journals of church leaders for publication poses serious ethical challenges. The work of these leaders, by its very nature, involves them in many maters that are sacred, private, or confidential. Matters of great sacredness deserve reverence. Divulging some kinds of information may violate principles of privacy. And persons who confess to religious leaders or communicate other information in a confidential setting expect that leaders will maintain their confidences.
	¶	… [W]e in the Church Historical Department seek to honor these principles while also making as much information as possible available to the public and clearly indicating any omissions with ellipses or notes.
	¶	Consistent with these principles, a committee of senior archivists from the Church Archives, after careful review, selected a small number of passages in this set for omission. Decisions to omit or retain specific passages took into account many relevant factors, including whether information at one time considered confidential has subsequently become a matter of public record. The omitted portions, ranging in length from occasional words to entire documents, represent far less than one percent of the original texts that make up this set. There have been no silent omissions—all items deleted appear as blacked-out words, sentences, paragraphs, or pages. While material has been redacted from [6] this digitized version for commercial distribution, the original materials used to produce these images have not themselves been altered.
		A frequenter of this site who wishes to remain anonymous writes that overall, he is "very pleased" with the collection, and adds:
		I think the total number of entries with partial or complete blackouts is about 326.
		The 28 omissions in the General Church Minutes section seem to fall into three categories. First, items dealing with the Temple. Second, alleged or confessed misconduct. Third, controversies between church leaders over doctrine and procedure.
		The initial BYU Studies website announcement gave a number of blackouts—I believe it was 68. Watch this website for notices of blackouts as they are discovered. (Please send volume, disk, and page number to [email protected].)
Critique
Musings		With such a vast array of materials, who's to complain about this or that collection not being included? Well, the following remarks are musings, not complaints.
Brother, where art thou?		John Taylor, George Q. Cannon, and Wilford Woodruff are completely missing. Is this solely due to time and space constraints or were there copyright considerations?
Wilford		Wilford expressly willed his voluminous journals to four sons with instructions to publish them. There is no question that the family owned the literary rights, even though the church had physical possession. In 1980, family representatives (presidents of all family branch organizations) contracted Signature Books to publish the journals. Copies are nearly impossible to come by nowadays, but the 9-volume set is available on the New Mormon Studies CD. Signature should look into the possibility of reproducing the journals digitally.
Joseph F.		Did attorneys submit any findings to the authorities regarding copyright for documents now in church possession that were produced by these brethren? Presumably they would have done so for the others, especially Joseph F. Smith, whose family organization is large and strong. Did that organization agree to publication of their ancestor's personal diaries and correspondence?
John		Is there a John Taylor family organization?
George Q.		Is the Cannon family oganization involved in the production of The Journals of George Q. Cannon series? What is the family's position on publication of this all-important document?
Documentation		Accompanying the disks is a 12-page document—10 pages of text—allocated as follows: 1.5 pages of introduction; 2 pages of thanks, appreciation, and grateful acknowledgments; 1.5 pages explaining blackout policy; 6 pages of contents. The printed contents is painfully inadquate (see TOC below).
		The electronic contents are easy to navigate if not always completely accurate. More Information links provide interesting background on each collection. It is too bad, though, that project leaders didn't see fit to toss in a couple more disks with the full registries already available in electronic format for many, if not most, of the collections in the set. Because they can be searched, these registries would have eliminated my two gripes (below) and greatly enhanced the usability of the set.
Gripes		The printed table of contents is lousy and there is no index, which means you don't always know which disk to insert.
Button, button, who's got the button?		Four important collections that span two or more disks (Brigham, Joseph F., George A., and Franklin D. Richards) are insufficiently detailed in the printed Contents. You want to look at Brigham's letters for 1869? Go fish. They are somewhere in disks 21–25 of the first volume. The odds of your finding the pea are better with the others, because they only involve two disks each, but simply adding one level of detail to these collections would have eliminated the guesswork as far as disks are concerned.	I have begun to address this problem in Selected Collections Alphabetically
The candle and the basket		Even a rudimentary index generated from names and topics in disk contents files, would have been better than nothing, and much more helpful than the printed Contents.
Final words of praise		The imaging is superior. In fact, it is probably easier to decipher most documents on DVDs than in the flesh, because you can click an image to instantly magnify it. Kudos to the technical team. But highest praise and thanks to those who selected the collections and those who developed and approved the editorial policies for the project. This is really a landmark event all can be proud of.
Looking forward		Now that the ice has been broken, is it too much to hope for Selected Collections: Part 2? Will BYU follow suit with the Whitney papers, Joseph Smith Sr. family papers, and Abraham H. Cannon diaries? Will Signature contact the Huntington, the Bancroft, the Utah State Historical Society, the Beinecke, Harvard, Princeton … I'm getting light headed, so I'll close now.
Bug file
Description		Bugs are a necessary evil, especially in prevalent in first version releases. They range from mundane typos to exhilarating system crashes. (Fortunately, I have found none that are particularly serious.) Bugs are important for job security. They are tracked to be fixed in the next release, when new bugs are introduced.
Finished - contents		May pertain only to external drives. (I don't have an internal drive to test.) A DOS window opens on the startup of each disk with the ominous message, "Bad command or file name". The window, which persists even after the disk is ejected, serves no purpose so far as the user is concerned, and should be automatically dismissed when the disk has loaded (if it has to be visible at all).
Incorrect journal listing		According to the printed Contents, 1:26 contains "Joseph F. Smith Journal, 1856–1881, 1883, 1909, and 1912 (MS 1325 Boxes 1–5)." I don't believe the department ever has had diaries for November 1858–March 1860 or April 27, 1876–December 31, 1878. At any rate, they are not on the disk.
Disk 1:24		Displays the name Vol_1_DVD_24, which is nice, but the first table of contents on the disk does not correspond to entries at the next level.
Title bar hyphens		Title bars can't handle en dashes (as in 1805–1844). They appear as vertical bars. Use hyphens instead.
Disk names		The Windows Explorer name of 1:29 is Vol_2_DVD_29. Change Vol_2 to Vol_1. Many disks display unhelpful names like 021215_2235.
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