Six years later, and I wonder if there’s a way to recommend a feature to LDS Library product managers:
Feature Request:
- Enable a method to share my links, notes, tags, etc with other gospel library users.
- To limit security challenges, this seems best if user-to-user, and only through only approved church applications.
- Perhaps just those members of my family, but why stop there? Many members would be able to share their scriptural insights to each other. Perhaps in a RSS-style format or something the architecture could be built to enable a security-based sharing protocol of notes, tags, links, notebooks, etc.
- Some thought will have to be given to making this too easy to share. Perhaps an intentionally one-to-one sharing model is better than a one-to-many sharing model to help keep so called Celebrities from being pressured to share their notes. Perhaps certain notes can be shared “publicly” like a public calendar feed, but the only way to share ALL your notes would be in a specifically one-to-one sharing method.
Many times over my life, I have heard stories of scriptures being passed down from generation to generation to pass on both the Living words of the Gospel, but also the notes, inspiration and highlights of our ancestors, combined with their interests, passions and journal entries. Surely, this kind of behavior helps ground the current reader in the reality and testimony of their ancestors and could more-fully help assist with the urgent effort I have heard in recent years from church leaders to grow more strong, multi-generational families that have been the backbone of the Church for many years.
To that end, and with current technology, in some future date, I envision the capability for me or my wife to share our notes and scriptural insights together and with our children and their children. Would it not enhance gospel learning to see a small, unique icon highlighting a verse for you to tap on and read a note from your great grandfather telling of how that verse changed their life or brought about a more fervent testimony or even a simply linking of that verse to another verse thereby deepening the scriptural understanding and insight AND strengthening the bonds across time and even the veil.
This has been impressed on my mind in one way or another for more than 10 years. I cannot shake it. The reality is that EACH TIME I make notes in the Gospel Library, I fear that content will eventually be digitally discarded and walled off from MY OWN CHILDREN and their children at some future date when I shuffle off this mortal coil (lol) and no longer need access to my Library in its temporal form.
I said already and I will say it again: I CANNOT SHAKE THE FEELING that we are creating a treasure trove of vast gospel insights that might be an incredible fountain of faith to our children and their children and their children.
Was it not Nephi who, seeing the destruction of his own posterity, endeavored even more fervently to keep the commandment of the Lord to write the words of his soul that perhaps some of his seed might be more diligent in the gospel, and that, in the end, the remnant of his seed (or, perhaps in a major twist of irony, the seed of his brothers,) would Come Unto Christ and be saved?
I dont write this here expecting change to happen soon. But if a PM for the great Church I love is listening or could be forwarded this and just think about it, please consider ways to setup our notes and tags and links today that some kind of future ability to share these notes, tags and links, even upon a member’s death if necessary, could be permitted, even if it was INSIDE the apps and within the security parameters the church needs to maintain.
Consider this a plea to build in some “elevator shafts”* in the current architecture that could be later built out and used, if desired by the leaders of the Church, to enable some careful sharing features of this content, which I think could prove useful to our children’s children’s children someday.
Thank you
* I know the elevator shafts in the SLC temple weren’t as revelatory as the urban legends say. Nevertheless, its pretty great that we have elevators in the SLC temple, regardless of the way the shafts got into the designs. Bravo, brother Angell. Bravo.
