Reviews -- New Mormon Studies CD-ROM



	New Mormon Studies CD-ROM A Comprehensive Resource Library (970 Works)

Journal of Mormon History, Marjorie Newton
Imagine being a child again, at a Christmas party where Santa Claus appears with a sackful of gifts which he proceeds to distribute to the assembled children. You scarcely know which intriguing parcel to hope for—a doll, a book, a game, roller skates—all are equally desirable. Acquiring a copy of the New Mormon Studies CD-ROM is to be given Santa's whole sack of toys, not just one gift. It is taking home whole shelves of books from the library with no return date. For anyone who likes reading about Mormonism, it is years of enjoyment. For an unfunded Mormon historian far from Utah and its Mormon history resources, it is heaven. As a fairly typical Australian, I seldom display the degree of lyric enthusiasm to which friends and family have been subjected since I received a review copy of New Mormon Studies CD-ROM.

Just imagine having every issue of Sunstone, every issue of Dialogue through 1996, every title in Signature Book's nonfiction catalogue plus every Mormon work from the University of Illinois Press, plus standard reference works like the earliest editions of LDS scriptures, the Journal of Discourses, and early LDS periodicals, all on one compact disk. It is the work of moments to locate specific works and references within them, and quotations can easily be highlighted, printed, or exported to one's own document. Having experienced no little difficulty navigating another infobase collection, I was delighted to find the New Mormon Studies product reasonably user-friendly. Not only are its contents wide-ranging and desirable, they are packaged so well that even this computer dummy was able to install the program and access its contents within minutes. It took longer to learn to use other functions, but I will return to this point later.

Nevertheless, I found writing this review unexpectedly difficult. I was assigned to report on the usefulness of this CD-ROM and its features—not to review the various books and journal issues contained on it. This task took more will power than I possess. Every session with the New Mormon Studies CD-ROM began with good intentions of exploring, testing, and noting its features; but within seconds of retrieving an article or book to use as a test case, I was captured. I repeatedly found myself reluctant to get on with the task in hand, instead simply browsing with great enjoyment in books I had longed to own and articles I had missed in the dull years before I met Dialogue and Sunstone. For the first time ever, I found myself eating dinner in front of the computer screen as I read.

For anyone interested in reading or writing Mormon history, this CD-ROM is invaluable. Particularly is this so for those like me who cannot easily access the LDS Church archives, have no local libraries with good collections of Mormon material, and have no institutional funding or research assistance. But even for Salt Lake City residents, the sheer convenience of having all this research material available at home or in one's own office must make the New Mormon Studies CD-ROM a top research tool for the Mormon historian or history buff.

The New Mormon Studies CD-ROM is not cheap. At $200 (or a little less through Sunstone), the would-be purchaser might think twice, but some elementary mathematics make it clear that it is a superb value at this price. For the price of about six hardback books, the purchaser acquires over 960 discreet works ranging from standard reference material like the Journal of Discourses to contemporary works by authors such as D. Michael Quinn, Eugene England, and Jan Shipps. As one who, on infrequent and very expensive visits to Utah, agonizes over the choice of four or five books to take home, the New Mormon Studies CD-ROM is bliss indeed.

Of course, any computer program has limitations. Nothing will ever quite replace the feel and smell of a well-bound book, or the delight of reading in bed or being able to slip a book into one's pocket or handbag to read on trains and buses or before and after (and, dare I admit it, during) meetings. But the sheer joy of having instant access to such a library more than compensates for this; and I have already printed out special articles from early issues of Dialogue and Sunstone for bedtime reading.

The categories include LDS Scriptures and Scriptural Studies, Periodicals, History, Biography, Autobiography, Diaries, Journals, Doctrine and Theology, and Contemporary Issues. Such a list is hard to fault. There is only one addition that would make the CD even more valuable—the inclusion of all previous issues of the Journal of Mormon History. Perhaps a future upgrade will fulfil this wish.

Unfortunately, technological limitations mean that occasional typos (which unfortunately print out) occur. At first I couldn't find how to print the title and author of an article or quotation, but it is really fairly logical (by following the menu commands: File, then Page Setup, then Header). The Windows-style commands make it relatively easy for anyone familiar with Windows to find their way around the database intuitively.

However, I had to be shown how to use some features by a more computer-literate friend, and I think the average computer user might need some assistance to access the full functionality of the program. This difference is not necessarily a criticism of the program; my friends assure me that most office workers require assistance in learning to use any Windows application. It is somewhat surprising that the Help Menu is not standard Windows format. This makes it more difficult to access and use, but it appears to be thorough and the glossary of terms is very helpful to computer simpletons like me. Obviously all features could be mastered by studying these tools; but a little help, if available, makes it easier.

The program requires a 386 (preferably better) processor, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, and a minimum of 4 MB RAM (though 8 MB is recommended), 10 MB hard disk space, a CD-ROM drive and VGA monitor with 256 color capable video card (or corresponding Macintosh facilities).

Church History, Grant Underwood
The appearance of this CD-ROM testifies that Mormon studies is "alive and well" on the eve of the twenty-first century. Noteworthy is the fact that neither the publisher that produced it nor most of the books and articles on Mormonism that it contains existed a scant thirty years ago. Greater access to Latter-day Saint church archives, professional organization and activism, new documentary discoveries, a rapidly proliferating body of practitioners, and the rise of a number of new publication outlets have all combined to make the past three decades a period in which the writing of Mormon history has flourished. This avalanche of scholarly studies of Mormonism is fully detailed in Studies in Mormon History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), with its 15,000-plus bibliographic entries. Though only a fraction of them appear on this New Mormon Studies CD, it is a valuable collection as far as it goes, even if that is far from the "comprehensive research library" its title claims it to be.

While the machine-readable texts (MRTs), along with the indexing and text retrieval software that make possible amazing feats of textual comparison and analysis, have been available for several decades, only with the advent of the space-generous CD-ROM have they become widespread commercially. In their selection of texts, the first commercial Mormon CDs, like their Bible studies counterparts, targeted a devotional audience. A Utah company called Infobases was created to capitalize on this market. Throughout the early 1990s, Infobases issued nearly annual editions of its LDS Collector's Library with larger and larger numbers of texts included. Finally, LDS book publishers got wise and decided to produce their own. Both the independent Signature Books and the church-owned Deseret Book issued a Mormon texts CD in 1998. Thus, there are now three commercially available, LDS-related CD-ROMs containing textual databases. As a historian of Mormonism, I own and use all three. At the risk of oversimplifying, both Infobase's LDS Collector's Library and Deseret Book's GospeLink are much larger databases composed primarily of literature "by" Mormons, generally of a doctrinal or devotional nature. They are useful for searches pertaining to the popular construction of Mormon theology, particularly in the twentieth century. The New Mormon Studies CD, on the other hand, contains more books "about" Mormonism, generally of an academic nature. Chief among them is a number of important books from the University of Illinois Press, which in the past quarter-century has distinguished itself as a leading publisher of Mormon-related scholarship. The CD also includes virtually the entire inventory of works published by Signature Books, as well as an almost full run of the two independent journals focused on Mormonism—Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Sunstone. For a noninstitutional perspective on the LDS Church and for gaining a historiographical sense of the scholarly construction of Mormonism, this CD is invaluable.

Like the other LDS databases, New Mormon Studies also contains a number of primary sources, especially from the early period of Mormonism, which are helpful to have in machine-readable form. Historically, Mormons have been a great diary-keeping and history-writing people. New Mormon Studies presents a significant sampling from the nineteenth century, including what is arguably the finest available diary from that period—the ten-volume, 1830s-1890s journal of longtime apostle and eventual church president Wilford Woodruff. That alone is worth the price of the CD for someone interested in early Mormonism. New Mormon Studies also contains a representative selection of important early Mormon tracts and pamphlets, many of which are not currently found on the other LDS CDs.

As useful as the collection is, it is not without its shortcomings. In an unusual decision, Signature Books chose to include unpublished research noted on a variety of Mormon topics. Though the snippets are interesting, the notes should be used with caution since the researchers are not identified. Users would have to visit the LDS archives in Salt Lake City in order to verify their accuracy. There is also a strong bias toward the nineteenth century in the included primary sources and almost nothing from Latter-day Saints outside of North America who now make up more than half of the LDS Church's ten million members. Buyers should also know that in response, and sometimes in overreaction, to what Signature Books appears to consider the protective, even paranoid, posture of the LDS Church toward its history, the company has tended to promote a "tell all, hold nothing sacred" publishing agenda. As a result, it has not always successfully separated the wheat from the chaff. Over the years a number of the included books have been panned in scholarly reviews for being too ideologically driven and lacking in sound scholarly methodology.

Still, for the scholar who approaches the collection with a bit of care and a sense of the politics involved, there is much that is useful and that is not available elsewhere in machine-readable form. As with most scholars in the humanities who know the texts they are working with through years of intimate, nonelectronic association, the primary benefit of this CD for the specialist in Mormon studies will be the facility and speed with which it enables textual searches and analysis. On that basis, it is worth its weight in gold. For the generalist, it is an inexpensive way to acquire a small, machine-readable library of secondary and primary sources on Mormonism.