Formal events planned by the church for the bicentennial include the new one-gallery museum exhibit, a new link on the church Web site, www.lds.org with information about him (yet to be posted) and a new film on his life that will screen later this year in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building Theater.

Individual congregations and regions will plan and hold their own celebrations as well, he said. Several local stakes and wards are planning a youth event in July at Rice-Eccles stadium to mark both Smith's bicentennial and the 175th anniversary of the church's establishment in 1830.

The church has also issued new curriculum materials that focus on Smith's life for seminary and institute teachers, designed for use in their classrooms this year.

Scholarly interest in Smith and the details of his life has grown in recent years, and the church is working with Brigham Young University to gather the widest selection of original materials ever collected.

Richard Turley, managing director of the church's Family and Church History department, is overseeing the collection of documents that include transcripts of materials now housed in private collections and even court documents that detail his legal difficulties.

Also included are Smith's own journals, diaries, letters and historical records that he and others kept. The material is widely scattered, Turley said, and several scholars, student researchers and volunteers are involved in retrieving the information for the multiyear project. While much of it is new, most of what exists is already owned by the church.

More than two dozen volumes are now on the drawing board, Turley said, and are scheduled for release toward the end of this year.

The project has been endorsed as a legitimate scholarly endeavor by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is affiliated with the National Archives. It is being funded by the church, BYU and "generous private funding," Turley said.

The Library of Congress and BYU will also co-sponsor a two-day symposium May 6-7 on "The Worlds of Joseph Smith." Religion scholars from Baylor, Columbia, Pepperdine and BYU along with other universities will participate, and Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve will be a featured speaker.

Other national involvement in the bicentennial celebration includes an intensive six-week seminar at BYU this summer for visiting scholars on "Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormonism: Bicentennial Perspectives." The seminar is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The NEH grant shows that the Mormon experience is considered a significant strand in the tapestry that makes up American culture, said project co-director Grant Underwood.

Two independent scholarly organizations, the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association, are both making the bicentennial the focus of their annual meetings.

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