Author: Stephen Cameron

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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

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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

Posted on 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

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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

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Tweaking the Cataloging Records

Hello everyone!

This week isn’t terribly exciting regarding any form of entering new cataloging records into the library’s system, so there won’t be any updates on that end. However, on Monday I was asked if I would be able to fix a slight issue that we had regarding the Aeon links we were using on the Special Collections website. These are the links that people could use to request the books that have been uploaded into the system, so, In light of that, I spent most of this week going in an fixing up the records of the books I had input over the past few weeks.

That’s all I’ve got for today, I’ll be here for another update next week!

Stephen Cameron

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Finishing One Collection and Starting Another

After learning the general catalogining process for the items that I would be cataloging, I was able to finish up the Community of Christ collection that we had and moved onto the Gomez Mexican-Mormon Collection. This collection is what I’ll be working on for the foreseeable future since there are a lot of boxes to work through with a lot of exciting items to look at and log into the system!

Here are a few pictures from one of the books I came across as I was cataloging. It is from a self-published book by Eran A. Call that he titled La Historia de la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias (Los Mormones).

La Historia de la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Ultimos Dias (Los Mormones).

This book is a brief summary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from its origin up to, assumed to be roughly, the date of publication. What particularly struck me in this book were many beautiful illustrations throughout the book that depict various events throughout this church’s history. Here are a couple of them:

I’ll apologize here for some of the image quality, the pages in the book are glossy and the lighting in the room made it somewhat difficult to get a picture lith less light glare in it. However, that being said the quality of the illustrations and pictures captures that Eran Call is attempting to portray in this book.

While I am cataloging part of tje Gomez Mexican-Mormon Collection, a large portion of it pertains to Eran Call, who was an LDS mission president in Mexico, and his writings as well as many of his possessions that he had that were eventually passed on to the owner of this collection. With that in mind, I think books like this are great additions for the collection as a whole and I can’t wait to see what else is in here.

Until next time!

Stephen Cameron

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Learning the Process

Hello everyone!

This week was about learning the cataloging process and starting to work through the Community of Christ collection that Special Collections had recently acquired. This is done through the creation of both local bibliographic data (LBDs) and local holdings records (LHRs). The creation of these two records allows for people to then search through Special Collections on the libraries website to see what we may, or may not, have, and from which one could request the item to view in the Reading Room.

As of right now, I only search through WorldCat to see if there are any bibliographic records at any other libraries worldwide, and create LBDs and LHRs accordingly, any records not found (as in, original books or otherwise) will be handed over to Cataloging and they will create a new record from there.

For me, it has all been a new process for me to learn as I have never had to play around with this side of the library or this part of the archival process. That being side, it has been a positive, enlightening experience that I believe will help me later on down the line in whatever career path I end up in.

After learning about the fundamentals of cataloging, I started working through the Community of Christ collection and creating LBDs and LHRs for the books I had prepped last week.

That will be it from me this week, I’ll be back next week to give an update on what I’ve been working on!

Stephen Cameron

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Getting Started

Hello everyone, I’m looking forward to working as a CCEPS Fellow this semester! This first post seems to be the appropriate place to give you all a brief introduction of myself before I get into the materials I’ll be working with. My name is Stephen Cameron, I graduated with a B.A. in History from Brigham Young University-Idaho in 2018 and more recently I received my M.A. in Religious Studies from Claremont Graduate University in 2022. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student in the Religion Department at Claremont Graduate University with an emphasis in Mormon Studies and New Religious Movements.

I’ll be contributing my efforts towards some collections that Special Collections has procured over the past few years. The main collection I’ll be working on is the Fernando R. and Enriqueta Gomez Collection in Mormon Mexican History, I will also be working with a number of Community of Christ monographs. There may be other items I’ll end up working with, but until then it will be a journey!

This is as good a place as any to admit that, while I am relatively familiar with both of these collections and their subject matter, this is a wholly new process for me to learn! I learned research and writing skills during my academic studies, but now I’ll be grappling with some of the technical aspects of archiving and processing. I hope you’ll tune into my updates as I make our way throughout the semester!

Until next time!

Stephen Cameron