Located at 15 E. North Temple, the Church History Library required 15 years of planning, four years of construction and a million artifacts moved. Since 1972, church history had been housed in the Church Office Building.

The building's artifacts range from an 1830 first-edition copy of the Book of Mormon to this year's edition of its Spanish-language Bible.

Billed as a "state-of-the-art archival facility," the library is now home to a collection that includes 270,000 books, pamphlets, magazines and manuals; 500,000 historical photographs, posters and maps; 23,000 audio and video recordings; 120,000 local histories of church units; 150,000 journals, diaries, papers and manuscripts; 20,000 rolls of microfilm; and 3.5 million patriarchal-blessing texts.

The Church History Library includes a dozen storage vaults controlled for temperature, humidity and security, including fire and seismic protections.

One of the most significant aspects of the new library is that it is designed for public accessibility. However, not all artifacts will be available for public research. Those considered sacred, private, confidential or too fragile will not be available.

The Church History Department's previous accommodations were designed to be more of an internal archive.

A history library was envisioned for the same site more than 48 years ago, when President David O. McKay and his church administration desired a separate history/archive building for the church.

By March 1962, plans for the first new archives/history building there were dropped due to the successful construction of the Granite Mountain Records Vault in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

The new library rates as one of the "greenest" buildings in the church today. It surpassed building code and energy-efficiency standards.

The Church History Library opens to the public Monday. Its normal hours of operation will be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.

E-MAIL: lynn@desnews.com