Can anyone explain the following from Ensign, January 2009, p. 77:
To align itself with other Church entities, including the new Church History Library now under construction, the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City is now the Church History Museum.
And sure enough, it already is, on the Church’s website. How does building the Church History Library change the alignment of the Museum of Church History and Art? Are the galleries on the second floor now only displaying a reminiscence of the Church’s past? Is next year’s Eighth International Art Competition the last of those triennial exhibits? Is some other “Church entity” taking on art curation?
All they’re doing is “aligning” the nomenclature.
They’ve done away with the Church Archives, mashing it together with the library and calling it the “Church History Library.” Since archives and libraries are very different things, demanding different skills from the professionals and different cataloging, it’s a dumb, stupid, dorky, demeaning thing to do, if you ask me. (Nobody did.) The Museum is lucky to still be a museum and not some adjunct gallery of the Church History Library.
I haven’t heard any explanation for either change, leaving me to speculate that its sole dumbing down purpose is to make all the phone numbers for that department fall in the same alphabetical space of the church directory.
Understand, please, that I don’t work for the Church; I just spend my working hours using their wonderful — if grossly misnamed — facilities.
If that wasn’t clear, and I don’t think it was, the stuff that matters (the actual activities of both the museum and the archives) hasn’t changed, only the names. Nobody visiting the museum is going to notice any change in the displays or function of the museum, just a change in the name over the door.
Although my understanding is that the next art competition (opening the end of Marach?) will be displayed in the Conference Center. It will still be managed by the musuem however.