So said the Lord through the Prophet Joseph Smith on the day the Church was organized. We have been a record-keeping people ever since, to a phenomenal degree – not that we have notes on everything to the level of detail we might sometimes want, but the records available for searching, whether held by the Church Archives or deposited in other repositories (university libraries, state archives, historical societies, Daughters of Utah Pioneers, the archives of other Restoration churches, etc.), or remaining in private hands provides such an abundance of ever-accumulating material that we may never fully assimilate all there is to understand.
For the past two weeks, and continuing on into May and June, the holdings of the Church Library and its Archives are being carted – by dolly, by library cart, by fork lift – from their old location in one wing of the Church Office Building through underground corridors and tunnels to their new home in the just-completed Church History Library just east of the Conference Center and just north of the Relief Society Building. The new building has been specially built as an archives building, balancing the competing interests of state-of-the-art technology to preserve and protect this wondrous but fragile heritage, with the need for access by students, scholars, and the interested public.