A little help from our neighbors

I found this local news item via The Prosperity Project, an excellent blog out of my soon-to-be-home state of Tennessee. A retired Canadian couple are touring through the state, helping to prepare local records for microfilming. "A little help from our neighbors to the North" is the title, although one does not need to read very far to guess that the "north" in the title should really apply to Utah, not Canada. (Okay, northwest).

This is the kind of service that the Church of Latter Day Saints -- which believes sinners can be redeemed even after death, and thus uses historical records to accomplish this goal -- has provided libraries, archivists and genealogists for a very long time. I like to think of the Church as the proto-Google. Or a proto-Google: Like our infinitely helpful and flexible friend GOOG, Mormons help strangers maintain access to data out of reasons dear to their mission. It would be overstating the case to say the only difference is that Google is positioning itself to be an omniscient and omnipresent force in this life,and Mormons in the next.

I find the parallels between the two mega data-miners incredibly fascinating, but even without it, the story about the couple passing across Tennessee after selling their cows and their B&B is a behind-the-scenes look non-archivists don't often get to take. It also positions archival work as something akin to holy work, really, as the Canadian couple are on what is explicitly referred to as a mission.