By MELISSA ROBERTSON
The Harold B. Lee Library Special Collections is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Mormon pioneers entering Utah Valley on the Internet.
'Into the Western Country,' a sesquicentennial exhibit, opens today in the Special Collections on the fourth floor of the Lee Library, said Scott Duvall, assistant university librarian for Special Collections.
The online version of the exhibit went on the Internet today as well.
David Whittaker, curator of Western and Mormon Americana, explained why the library chose to use the Internet to display this exhibit.
'We have done other exhibits, but this year we felt the need to take part in the assignment to disperse treasures dealing with this period,' Whittaker said.
Journals, newspapers, maps, letters, photos, books and other publications from the time are included in the exhibit, which contains about 50 documents from BYU's archives, Duvall said.
The Internet version of the exhibit divides the documents into five categories: Nauvoo, Iowa, the 1847 trek, later pioneer companies and life in Utah territory.
On the Internet, a person can go into a category and look at an image of the original documents, a short or long description of each of the documents, transcripts of the original documents and, in some cases, photographs of the people involved.
The documents are linked by time, subject, proper names and places, so if a person reads about a place like Mt. Pisgah, they can go to other documents that talk about it, Duvall said.
Another advantage of the Internet is that people can look at more than one page of some of the texts, Whittaker said.
The original documents are in glass cases, so people who view the regular exhibit can only see what is open.
Two hundred images were scanned from the approximately 50 items in the exhibit and some of the documents in the exhibit have never been seen by scholars.
Three drawings of Winter Quarters by Thomas L. Kane that are part of the exhibit were released six months ago, Duvall said.
Many of the documents in the exhibit have been available for research, but they are kept in locked cases because they are so valuable.
Duvall said he hopes the Internet will make documents in Special Collections more available to scholars and the public.