April 2025 – Out of the Box

April 26, 2025 by Stephen Cameron

The Next Box and Finishing Up the Community of Christ Collection

Welcome back!

After finishing up the hymnal box last week I had a few boxes to choose from to work on next, among them is a box full of A/V material and another two are filled with bound Liahona periodicals. However, I ended up choosing another container with a number of monographs in it before going back on working on the others.

So far, I’ve found that there are a lot of books from the pre-1950s in fairly good condition. Among them was an interesting book titled “Some Suggestions for Latter-Day Saint Missionaries: From the Field of Successful Commerical Salesmanship,” which is an interesting take on how LDS missionaries should approach their missionary work abroad. As the title suggests, it seems like its an approach that utilizes a charismatic, door-to-door salesman charm to apply and teach gospel principles. If nothing else, it’s a unique take on missionary work. Among these works are nice Spanish translations of both “Jesus the Christ” and the “Articles of Faith” by James E. Talmage.

I also finished up the Community of Christ collection that I had been working on a number of weeks ago. We weren’t sure sublocation information we should be putting on the ID flags and the Aeon hyperlinks, but we ultimately figured it out, so I spent one day this week fixed up that information and officially passing the collection off to Cataloging.

Anyway, that’s it for me this week, I’ll give my weekly update on what I’m working on next week!

Stephen Cameron

April 19, 2025 by Stephen Cameron

Finishing Up the Hymnals

This is going to be a bit of a shorter post, this week seemed to fly by! I was able to finish sorting the hymnals and cataloging the copies that already have records online, the other ones will be moved over to the cataloging department and they will finish up the rest of them.

One of interesting conundrums I faced while I was working through the hymnals was that there were both print books and musical score records for them. Since I was mostly working with monographs in the collections, I hadn’t come across records where I had to make a choice like this over which record would be more appropraite to sort them into. After some discussion and training, we determined that placing the hymnals we have into the “musical score” section would be the best call.

After finishing up the hymnals, I have started on the next box which contains a number of monographs from the first half of the Twentieth Century. I’ll share some more about that next time.

Stephen Cameron

April 11, 2025April 19, 2025 by Stephen Cameron

Moving on to Hymnals

Hello everyone!

This past week I was able to finish up the box of copies of the Book of Mormon that I had been working on. In total, there were about twenty-five to thirty different languages in the collection. After working my way through those, I started the cataloging process on the next box in the Gomez Collection which contained a lot of Spanish hymnals!

What I noticed early on as I was looking through them was that, although they all had the same copyright date on them, many of the hymnals contained a different amount of hymns in them. with about half of them containing 256 hymns, while the other half only had 252. Due to the discrepency, I spent some time separating them out into a few different piles according to their hymn count, printing date, and language.

As I was sorting them, I came across one particular name that stuck out to me which, after a little digging, I believe belongs to a former LDS leader and apostle, Richard G. Scott. I can’t be exactly sure at this point, but the signs point in that direction. Here is a photo of the book!

That’s it from me this week. Until next time!

Stephen Cameron

April 5, 2025 by Stephen Cameron

Cataloging Copies of the Book of Mormon

Hello everyone!

This week I have spent a majority of my time working through one of the boxes in the Gomez Mexican-Mormon History collection which contains many, many various copies of the Book of Mormon. As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a global church, they have sought to translate one of their most important books of scripture into a variety of languages in a widespread attempt to reach as many people as possible. As of right now, there are over 100 various translations!

With that in mind, it has been a neat experience to go through this particular box and seeing all the copies that the Gomez’s have collected over the years. So far I have come across 25, from Icelandic, Lithuanian, and Polish, to Arabic, Armenian, and Greek.

While I was working through the cataloging process earlier I realized that I needed to tweak some of the call numbers because the printing date differed from the copyright and/or the publishing date. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson now and won’t forget in the future! There are so many little things here and there that I need to remember that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the small peculiarities in the system, all in all thoough it has been quite an enlightening experience!

Until next time!

Stephen Cameron