My last post about the Mormon Literature & Creative Arts database generated some great suggestions for its improvement, and I thought I would respond by describing where we are at and how we see the MLCA feeding into a larger project of supporting Mormon Studies.

I have to smile when I read the suggestions for more tech people and for all the full text requests. We spent two years designing the site and gathering contributing databases (one from Gene England and another from two BYU librarians), and in the five years it’s been online I’ve enlisted a small army of paid and unpaid students and volunteers to crawl through every source we can find to enter bibliographic and biographical information. Meanwhile, since the site is sponsored by the Harold B. Lee Library (for which I’m very grateful) we have to compete with every other library IT project (of which there are many worthy examples such as the Overland Trails diary project or Connie Lamb’s newly finished Relief Society Magazine Index). Programmer time is a precious commodity. Only two IT people serve a long line of people and we have to wait literally months (our last wait has been a year) for even minor programming updates. This is one reason we have structured the database so that we can do a lot of customizing along the way (adding new genres, for example), but right now we are trying to get new database fields in to better serve the kinds of info we need for Mormon films and Mormon music. This is a very big job first to design and then to get implemented. Meanwhile we have to try to keep up with new publications and fill in embarrassing holes in the biographies and bibliographies of the 7,000+ authors in the database. We’ve resorted to making “focus lists” of authors within each genre to try to prioritize who gets attention first.

As for linking to full texts, I’ve had volunteers make links to all the poetry and fiction in the New Era and Ensign and in Dialogue. This can be disheartening at times when you have many many volunteer hours put in to link to an outside database only to have that database shift its URLs rendering every link suddenly broken. We have received permission from all the LDS publishers to copy almost all book and author info from their sites, and we do so because commercial sites do not permanently keep info up about these works and authors. When it’s out of print, the web page often goes away. And with sites like Sunstone’s and Dialogue’s (or Signature Books’), what they do is so haphazard, idiosyncratic, and spotty (I realize they often work with small budgets and volunteers) that the thought of linking to their specific pages is high risk.

Kent Larsen mentioned opening up the MLCA to others. From the beginning we have had a distributed administration model and we have opened up admin access to people we trust (meaning they know how the database works–conventions, etc. that keep us from duplicating or destroying data). I trust you, Kent. Let me know and I’ll get you a password and train you. We’d love to get more help on an ongoing basis (big thanks to Marny Parkin for her ongoing maintenance of LDS science fiction and fantasy on the MLCA, by the way!).

A wiki was mentioned. Right now at BYU, thanks to Jack Welch, a wiki is getting ready for launch that will be based on the existing Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Those of us working on it see it as becoming a central gateway for Mormon studies. In addition, all those doing various Mormon studies projects at BYU are going to be invited to participate in a central Mormon Studies Blog that will be spearheaded by Mike Hunter (the Mormon Studies librarian at BYU responsible for the Mormon Studies website). He and I are currently working with a prototype wiki to reorganize that page and prepare to relate its info with the Encyclopedia of Mormonism wiki, the Mormon Studies blog, and in turn all of the contributing Mormon studies databases and sites (such as the MLCA or the Mormon History database Liz mentioned).

This is just to say that great efforts are in the works to bring a more organized approach to Mormon studies materials. We know we must combine the great communication tool of blogs with the collaborative and updatable advantages of a wiki with the large database sets already out there. In addition to all of the above, we are trying to bring about some metadata protocols for any/all Mormon studies efforts so that these can be accessed through metadata harvesters and more readily combined. In the next year BYU Studies, for example, will be published through the Open Journal System, whose metadata layer will open present and past issues to Google Scholar and other metadata harvesters and this will make articles much more visible. (For the gory details about the need for metadata, see my article in progress, “Preparing for the Harvest: Why Metadata Matters for Mormon Studies.“)

We’ve found that we have to be thinking very much about coordinating with others as we try to keep completing our individual database development. This is building for the long haul, and it does take a LOT of time, effort, communication, and goodwill.