10 years ago today - May 28, 2005

The Church News reports comments from Elder Marlin Jensen:

"[W]e're working on what I think will be the single most significant historical project of our generation: the Joseph Smith papers. With the help of scholars at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History and our own staff here, we have under way a project that will collect all of the papers of Joseph Smith's lifetime: his journals, his diaries, his correspondence, articles, notices, everything of a written nature that he generated."The result of the 10-to-15-year project, he said, will be a work of up to 35 volumes that will enhance the collective scholarship about the Prophet in that no credible historian will be able "to write about early Church history or Joseph Smith without showing a mastery of this material."

[Source: R. Scott Lloyd, "'Historian by yearning' collects, preserves: Elder Marlin K. Jensen is historian/recorder," Church News, May 28, 2005, Z12, quoted in Joseph Smith Papers Timeline: History of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, MormonWasp Blog (defunct)]