While finding buried treasure may seem like a childhood fantasy, that very thing happened during the recent renovations on campus.

Michael Cowan was assisting with the recent fire alarm retrofit in the Grant Building and happened upon a bit of BYU history completely by chance.

“I set my flashlight down and the beam was shining through a hole in the brick,” Cowan said. “I saw pages and a blue cover so I investigated further and found that the walls in that area are literally stuffed with them.”

To university archivist Gordon Daines’ delight, Cowan had uncovered pamphlets of BYU’s course catalog, some dating back as far as 1938.

“As far as I can tell they were used as a type of grout stop in the masonry walls under the main staircase,” Cowan shared.

Cowan has found other out-of-the-ordinary things.

“While crawling around many of the older buildings at BYU, I have found many interesting objects including many old Daily Universes as early as 1965 and, funny enough, a partially consumed bottle of whiskey that dates back to the 70s,” Cowan said.

Karen Glenn, an archival assistant in L. Tom Perry Special Collections, will spend part of the Summer as an intern at the Library of Congress through the Junior Fellows Summer Internship Program. This is a very competitive program, and Karen is one of the first BYU students to participate.
Karen found out about the internship through an email sent out by her Congressman, Dan Lungren. As a member of the Joint Committee on the Library, Congressman Lungren could nominate one college student from his district for the internship, and after a lengthy application process and interview, he selected Karen. She has been assigned to work with a curator in archival management, and at the end of her internship Karen will present her findings to Congressman Lungren and Librarian of Congress James Billington.
An International Relations major graduating in April 2009, Karen was hired in Special Collections six months ago.
“Working in Special Collections made me fall in love with library archival work,” Karen said. “I am very excited for the opportunity to work in our national library after graduation.”
Special Collections curator John Murphy wrote one of the reference letters for Karen’s application.
“Karen is very bright, and she has a natural ability and talent for librarianship and all things archival,” Murphy said. “She has met all of my expectations as a student employee, and she has the skills to thrive in a professional environment. Typically these internships are awarded to graduate students, so Karen has distinguished herself and the university by being selected. It is a great honor for our library to send a student of this caliber to the Library of Congress.”
After her internship and some more work experience, Karen hopes to continue her education in a Masters of Library and Information Science program somewhere on the East coast.

For generations graduate students have taken copies of their theses and dissertations to be bound and then the library cataloged them and put them on a shelf. And that is where most of them stayed. The majority of these publications are rarely, if ever checked out. Now the library’s Electronic Theses & Dissertation (ETD) system puts graduate students’ work online in electronic format where researchers can and more importantly do see it. Instead of a thesis being looked up once or twice in a decade, the electronic versions are being looked at hundreds of times. This system has changed the impact of graduate student publishing. It used to be that the library collected the best works from around the world and brought them to Provo. Now the library is sending work from Provo around the world.

Some examples of the change in the visibility of BYU graduate students work can be seen by following the thesis of Brent Weight. Weight’s thesis was featured in a news article in 2003 on the establishment of the ETD system.The printed copy of weight’s thesis has been check out of the library a couple of times, but users of the BYU computer network have viewed his thesis over 300 times. Even more interesting is that researchers outside of BYU have viewed Weight’s work almost 800 times.

Some graduate students work seems to attract even more outside attention. Kazumasa Aoyama’s work, Using A Diglot Reader to Teach Kanji: The Effects of Audio and Romaji on the Acquisition of Kanji Vocabulary has been viewed over 16,000 times by researchers outside of BYU.

When people talk about the Internet and what that will mean to the library of the future they don’t have to speculate. At BYU the library of the future is here. There are still books on the shelves, but the information systems of the future are already falling into place. Beyond the online service for graduate student publications The Harold B. Lee Library offers a similar service for faculty using the DSpace system.

Ross and Anita Farnsworth have been helping students in the Lee Library and at BYU for many years. Their contributions seem to be a natural extension of the parental instincts they’ve cultivated from bringing up their own 12 children and seeing them get an education.

They have not only contributed their finances to the university, they have also been generous with their time and talents over the past 20 years, contributing to the latest expansion of the Lee Library and serving as BYU library and alumni board members. The Lee Library recognized their service by naming the Juvenile Literature Library in their honor. A photograph of the couple, reading with their grandchildren, hangs in that area.

Ross and Anita met and married in Mesa, Arizona, and he worked as a high school political science teacher; a job he said he “thoroughly enjoyed.” Despite his love for teaching, Ross turned down an offer by the school district to serve as a principal and instead, took a chance starting a business with his father and brothers.

The business grew slowly and Ross and Anita worked together to make ends meet while their children came in rapid succession. “We just said we’ve both got our health, we’ve got low house payments, we can all work,’” says Anita. “The kids can get jobs, we can do paper routes. Whatever it takes, we can do it.”

While working and raising a family, the two served in almost every church calling possible. Ross says his favorite was being a bishop because it was the hardest and most rewarding for him. Anita says she liked whatever calling she was doing at the time the most.

To maintain a strong, united family, the Farnsworths put a system in place many years ago. Family Home Evening was observed weekly and Saturday mornings were spent doing chores. “Then we went and had fun,” says Ross. Biking, swimming and picnicking were common activities for the family on most weekends.

It would be easy for the couple to justify using their time and resources for other ends besides helping the library (and many other community organizations). But Ross says, “I think we have been so blessed with what we have and were able to obtain, we should share it back out. I believe that.”

“Everyone should share what they’ve been blessed with.”

When asked about their advice for this generation of students, Anita admonishes them to keep the commandments, trust the Lord, follow the counsel of the prophets and find the truth of the gospel themselves. She also advises young people to be generous with their time and their means, giving to the Lord and wherever else they are able.

“Do what you can,” she adds. “Make your home and family first. The Lord and your home are the most important things of all. Keep that foremost.”

And Ross’s lifelong advice? “Pursue a steady course,” he says. “That’s good if you’re in business, going on a mission, whatever you are doing, if you just gain your testimony, follow the Lord.” He says that advice has not only helped him spiritually, but has also helped reduce stress in his life.

Joe Gonzalez, the LDS Foundation’s representative in the Lee Library, has known and worked with Ross and Anita for more than twelve years. During that time he has observed the way the couple strives to help others.

“The Farnsworths have continually demonstrated the traditional conception of charity, which is giving financially, but more importantly, they have shown charity as being the power of Christ to uplift and change lives,” says Gonzalez. “They truly are their brother’s keeper in an expanding, global sense.”

The “daguerreotype” was donated by Utah residents Mark and Suzanne Richards this past December. Mark’s grandfather, Preston Nibley, served as an official Church historian from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s and wrote the book, Brigham Young – The Man and His Work, published in 1936.

When researching the book, Nibley became acquainted with several of Brigham Young’s descendents, including his daughter, Clarissa Young Spencer. Mrs. Spencer presented Nibley with a few of her father’s personal possessions, including a handkerchief with “Prest. B. Young” printed on one corner, a metal spoon with the initials “BY” on its handle and the daguerreotype.

Mark Richards says the items were kept in his family, transferred from his grandparents to his parents and then to him. Recognizing its significant historical value and the necessity of preserving it using the best means possible, Mark and Suzanne donated the daguerreotype to Special Collections.

“I feel that it is appropriate that the daguerreotype of Brigham Young should go to the university that bears his name,” Mark said in a recent interview. “Not so much for its monetary value, but for the memory of my grandfather and his preference for things of real value over material possessions.”

A copy of the daguerreotype can be seen in Preston Nibley’s book (mentioned above). Another book, Brigham Young – Images of a Mormon Prophet, written by BYU professor, Richard Holzapfel and R.Q. Shupe, also contains a copy of the same image. In that work, a caption indicates that the actual daguerreotype is “nonextant,” meaning its whereabouts were unknown to the authors at the time.

Holzapfel has estimated the date of the photograph to be around 1854.

Tom Wells, photo archivist for Special Collections, explains that the daguerreotype method of taking photos was invented in France in 1839 and was introduced to the Salt Lake Valley in 1850 by photographer Marsena Cannon, who is believed to have captured the image of President Young. The images were created by coating one side of a thick copper metal plate with silver, buffing the silver coating to a mirror finish, sensitizing it to light and then exposing it in the camera. Since the resulting image is backwards, the daguerreotype depicts the prophet with his hair parted on the right instead of on the left side as he wore it.

Wells says that with digitizing and mass printing, photos or old images are easy to come by. “But to have as an artifact the copper plate bearing Brigham Young’s image that was actually in the camera that he sat in front of is very exciting,” he declares.

“As you look at the image and know that Brigham Young also looked at that very same image it’s a rush!”

Special Collections and the Lee Library’s conservation lab will build a customized box to house and protect the daguerreotype and make it available for students, patrons and other researchers to view. Therefore, Brigham Young’s and everyone else’s descendants can enjoy it; just what the Richards family had in mind.