Church revising the way its history is preserved

SALT LAKE CITY — The Church History Department has been around for a long time.

In fact, the office of Church Historian was first constituted on the day the church was organized in 1830 as one of the first three positions. Since then, people have been trying to gather, collect, preserve and share the history of the church.

"In the past we sent people out. They've traveled the world, interviewed people and gathered documents, took photographs and brought it back to the Church History Department to be preserved," said Wayne Crosby, director of global support and training. "As the church grew, it just became too unwieldy to continue that same model."

Last year, it was decided that they needed to implement a decentralized model and start making church history more accessible to the world. Under the direction and approval of area authorities, options will be given to preserve area histories locally — and hopefully, in the future, digitally.

"We wondered, 'How do we fulfill the commandments of the Lord to keep a history of the church continually and do it in a way that we weren't asking the brethren for millions more dollars in head count by controlling everything from headquarters?'" Crosby said.

In the world there are 15, if you don't count the Middle East, international areas in the church. Each one has an area presidency responsible for operating the church within their area, Crosby said. This year, Elder Marlin K. Jensen, the Church Historian Recorder, met with each of the area presidencies and invited them to call a local person, or missionary if needed, to be an area church history adviser. The church history adviser would then be responsible for coordinating any church history activities in the area, which would then need to be approved by the area presidency. They can pick two or three areas, such as: stake, district and mission annual histories, oral histories, collecting, websites, landmarks, record repositories, publishing, historic sites — to focus on in a given year.

"Our old model was like the British Museum where we brought everything from Salt Lake and you could only see it in Salt Lake City. In our big church, that doesn't work anymore very well," Crosby said.

One idea is to establish regional record repositories. The records, while still part of the church collection, would be kept locally — making it more accessible to the people of the area. The hope is to tie everything together with an integrated catalog. No matter where you are in the world, you'd be able to see what the church has.

Another idea being pursued is building a virtual library where content can be digitized, so that no matter where the content is being stored, anyone with the Internet can access it.