As a counselor in the Stake Presidency, I had an assignment to speak in the Saturday evening adult session of Stake Conference. This is traditionally one of my very favorite meetings, so I was particularly interested in being prepared and saying something that would add to what I knew would be a very spiritual meeting. My topic was based on Alma 34:33:

33 And now, as I said unto you before, as ye have had so many witnesses, therefore, I beseech of you that ye do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end; for after this day of life, which is given us to prepare for eternity, behold, if we do not improve our time while in this life, then cometh the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed.

(emphasis added)

Whenever we speak about this scripture we tend to focus on the “procrastinate”, which is an important and appropriate thing to talk about. I was struck with the more positive notion of “improving our time” and spoke about productive things we could do to “improve our time” and take advantage of our opportunities to learn and to serve simply by doing things we already do, but doing them a little better. I thought it was going to be a pretty good talk.

The opening hymn of the meeting was Today While the Sun Shines.

Today, while the sun shines, work with a will;
Today all your duties with patience fulfill.
Today, while the birds sing, harbor nor care;
Call life a good gift; call the world fair

Today, today, work with a will;
Today, today, your duties fulfill.
Today, today, work while you may;
Prepare for tomorrow by working today.

Today seek the treasure better than gold,
The peace and the joy that are found in the fold.
Today seek the gems that shine in the heart;
While here we labor, choose the better part.

Today seek for goodness, virtue, and truth,
As crown of your life and the grace of your youth.
Today, while the heart beats, live to be true,
Constant and faithful all the way through.

As I sang I was struck with how perfectly the message of this hymn fit the theme of my talk. Our Stake Music Director is particularly adept at doing this. She is very spiritual and seeks to find just the right messages to add to the spirit of the meeting. As I continued to sing “Today, today”, the rhythm and consistency of that message continued to stike a chord in me, as music does so powerfully.

When we sat down I pulled my Blackberry from my jacket and called up LDSLibrary.com and did a search for this hymn. I hoped that Karen Davidson’s great reference book, Our Latter-day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages, would have something interesting. I was pleased to find this:

Several of our hymns admonish us to use our time to good advantage. “Today, While the Sun Shines” is particularly emphatic. By the time we have sung the three verses with the refrain that follows, we have sung the word today no fewer than twenty-eight times! No one can miss the message of this hymn.

When I stood to speak, I felt impressed to reference this hymn and the message it taught, and the fun fact that we had said the word “today” 28 times during the song. Throughout my talk, as I spoke about “improving our time”, I was able to add emphasis to my point by adding “today, today”. This simple phrase resonated with the congregation because the music was still ringing in their ears and amplified by the reference from from Sister Davidson’s book to place additional emphasis. Each time I said “today, today”, I had the added strength of the hymn to back up my point. It was a real cool experience and ended up being a far better talk than it was originally.

I was grateful for the power of the hymn, an inspired Music Director, that the spirit directed an approach that added greatly to the message, and for the mobile LDSLibrary.com that gave me quick and relevant info on the spot, at the moment I needed it.

Last night my Bishop called me at about 9:00. It seems that there is a faithful sister in our ward who, despite having sent a son on a mission and prepared other children to go to the temple, has never received her own endowment. She has a strong desire to go and the Bishop is anxious for her to go. Our ward’s Temple Preparation teacher is going out of town on business for about three weeks, and the Bishop didn’t want to wait that long to go through the Temple Prep lessons. Knowing that I had taught this before, he called to ask if I would be willing to teach it again. I jumped at the chance! Teaching the Temple Prep class is one of the sweetest assignments I have ever had.

The last time I taught the class, the Lesson and Talk Builder was a new product, so I determined that I would use it in my preparation to test it out. Had I been blogging at the time, I would have blogged about that product almost every day! While it takes some getting used to and isn’t the most intuitive program I’ve ever used, it is very robust and and a valuable preparation tool. I have used it for nearly every talk I have ever written for Stake Conference, Stake Priesthood meetings, and every other speaking assignment I have had.

Last night after the Bishop called I gained a whole new appreciation for the Lesson and Talk Builder when I remembered that every lesson I had previously prepared was archived in the program for me — complete with assignments, handouts, agendas and outlines. Now I will certainly review all of these previously prepared lessons and rethink what is relevant for the new class and seek the spirit to help personalize those lessons, but I won’t have to start from scratch, which saves me time, and allows me to build on the knowledge I gained the last time I prepared.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

By the way, all of our software products are available at LDSAudio for shipping or download.

You may have noticed that there has been a lapse in posting to this blog in the past year, as well as a lapse in activity on the LDSLibrary.com site.
Welcome back!!

The past year has brought many internal changes to Infobase Media Corp. The good news is that we have survived those changes, have made some positive changes to the LDSLibrary.com site, and are ready to welcome all of you who have tried the site over the past couple of years to make this great tool a regular part of your personal gospel study, your lesson preparation and a valuable tool for the whole family.

Most of the changes on the site are in the back end — cleaning up the programming to make the site more stable, the searches faster and more relevant. We have also added the most recent conference reports to keep the content current and up to date.

Most importantly, we have gone to great lengths to make the site compatible to cell phones and other mobile devices. When the site is called by a mobile device, it recognizes that the mobile browser and actually sends a site optimized for mobile devices — fewer graphics — login and search bar at the top of the page, truncated search results, more results per page — everything possible to make the mobile experience faster and easier to navigate.

If you haven’t logged in for a while — give the site a try. If your subscription has expired — renew it! Most importantly — use the “contact us” link or the forum, or comment on the blog. Tell us your experiences, your ideas, your successes and insights. Let’s create a community of users to enhance everybody’s experience using this great tool. If you like the tool, tell a friend, a family member, a Sunday School teacher — anyone you think would benefit. The more subscribers we get, the more improvements we can make. Let’s grow this together.

I look forward to your input.

We want everyone to be able to try our new LDS search engine, so we are offering a free two-week trial, with no credit card required. When you find a page that requires a subscription, just click through to the free trial page, and sign up with your email address. We’ll give you immediate access to our entire LDS library, and we’ll email you a temporary password that you can use for the next 2 weeks.

We hope you enjoy our web site and that you’ll tell others to come visit us. This free trial offer is for a limited time, so please spread the word. Your friends will thank you.

We keep receiving nice comments and suggestions from our customers. Here are some examples:

I am so impressed with your new search engine. It is FANTASTIC! I can only imagine the hours it will save Sunday School and Relief Society/Priesthood teachers….making insights to scriptures or topics by the general authorities only a click or two away. Thank you for creating such a wonderful search engine. I know it will be used on a regular basis by so many members. I only wish there was more for Primary teachers…there does not seem to be much for us on the search engine.

And another:

My thanks how ever for making it VERY visually impaired friendly!

And now some questions:

1. When is the program available? 2. What is the cost involved? 3. Is there a discount for current users of LDS Library 2006? 4. When are you including the “quotations” from a previous library? They were extremely helpful for me teaching a class.

Here are some answers to these questions and others that we are hearing:
We are very close to making the subscription available–probably just days away. For now, we are still doing a free preview.

Our online subscription will be $49.95 per year but we are considering some introductory pricing and/or possible discounts for customers of our CD ROM products. Later this year we will offer a “premium subscription” that will provide access to thousands of audio and video clips which can be played on your computer or downloaded to your ipod or other mp3 player. We are also contemplating some exciting personalization and community features.

We will look into adding the quotes database that was included in earlier Infobases libraries. It was a great source.

Some customers have noticed that page numbers are missing from many of our online books. We are planning to add page numbers to the references that are currently missing them as soon as possible.

Please keep the feedback and comments coming. We are paying close attention to every comment and request.

We have released a new version of LDSMedia.com and are providing a sneak preview for a few days. So try it out and spread the news!

We have tried to make it easier to find any book in the entire 3,300 volume library and any article published in the periodicals that we have indexed. You can browse our collections by category from the main page or you can try out our new author search and title search feature.

I personally love the title search. I did a search for “debt” and found 142 articles, talks or chapters of books that contain the word “debt.” This is a quick way to do a survey of LDS literature and beliefs on just about any topic.

We have also made it easier to get to certain parts of the library. The earlier version let you click “Next” to go through the hits in the library. First, you would browse through the scriptures. Then the conference talks. And then other portions of the library.

That was sometimes very time consuming and frustrating.

Now after a search you can immediately jump to any section of the library and see the “hits” in that section. For example, if you search for “young ambassadors” you can click on the “Church News” section and see the 64 times the young ambassadors were mentioned there, or you can click on “Biographies” and see the 11 times the young ambassadors were mentioned in biographies of general authorities.

Once again, we invite you to try our new version and please give us feedback about what you like, what you love, and what you’d like to see changed.

We appreciate the scores of emails and comments that we have received so far. We are still listening.

If you run a website for church members or if you blog about gospel topics, we have an exciting announcement for you.

In order to encourage more use of the scriptures by internet users, we are inviting LDS webmasters to put a searchable Book of Mormon or the complete Standard Works on their own web sites.

The PlugNSearch ™ technology developed by Provo Labs will enable any site to put a few lines of javascript on their site and start delivering search results to their own site visitors.

This search engine will function just like the scripture search on LDSMedia.com; but the results will all be displayed on your own web site.

If you are a webmaster or blogger and would like to be one of our first partners in this new program, please email michaeleagar AT provolabs.com.

We received this nice comment from a “customer” of our new LDSMedia.com web site:

I have always been impressed with Gospel Link; but could never afford it. As I search different key words, it is remarkable. I am 69 years old and have just been called to teach the 7 going on 8-year-olds. Even thought I have taught the Gospel for years, this would be extremely beneficial as I find these children so hungry to learn the Gospel.

Not everyone can afford to purchase a gospel library on CD ROM or buy a subscription to an online library containing thousands of books. But authors and publishers need revenue in order to continue writing and publishing great books.

Our plan is to keep a large portion of our search engine and gospel library free to all church members, including the scriptures and content that is indexed from other sites. Like Google and Yahoo, we can index content from other sites and let our users search our index to find what they are looking for.
But there will also be a vast library of content from Deseret Book and other sources that will be accessible to our paying subscribers. If enough customers pay for subscriptions then we can continue providing royalties to authors and building our library of texts, images, and audio and video clips so that church members can have convenient access to all the best gospel study and teaching materials in the world.

I enjoyed this comment from one of our users yesterday who likes the page number search feature on our LDS Media advanced search page:

It is wonderful to see that you have added in the Advanced Search–searching by page number. So often I needed that when I was a volunteer institute teacher (11 plus years) at Dartmouth College. In browsing your Gospel Link items, I noticed, and tried out, a few of the MP3 recordings of a couple of books. Are these available when you purchase Gospel Link or just when you go to the website? Because you gave away a free copy of Jesus the Christ on MP3s I have become a believer!! It is so wonderful to listen, and read along with marking pencil in hand, to this great book. Other solid works like Jeus the Christ, Articles of Faith, Discourses of Brigham Young, etc, are a wonderful blessing and I hope you continue. As funds allow, I hope to purchase more of them in the future. They would make great Christmas presents. Thanks again for your improvements and thinking about how we like to learn.

The answer to her question about MP3s is that individual mp3 titles can be purchased and downloaded at LDSAudio.com. But we are plan to identify hundreds of really wonderful audio (and later video) clips that can be used in lessons or in family home evenings. And full access to these clips should be available as part of our LDS Media subscription plan.

We’ll have a subscription plan that covers just the thousands of full text books in our gospel library, and we’ll also have an enhanced subscription plan that also includes a lot of audio and video content.

These will likely be finalized and announced in the next couple of weeks.

We received the following comments from a church member in Australia yesterday:

I have to say I find the search results fantastic! Having used GospelLink 2001 for years, typing in search phrases I expected the new GospelLink/LDSMedia to show similar results, namely 5 words on either side of the key words/phrase. How wonderful then to find the entire paragraph around the term, making it so much easier to see if the paragraph shown is what is required instead of having to click through each one “just in case”! The only suggestion I can think of (and may already be contained somewhere just not visable/obvious in the sneak-peak) is a drop-down list of authors, so we could see which items are available as searching on names can show up huge numbers of results! I love the new GospelLink - can’t wait for the whole lot to be released!

We pay attention to every comment from every user. I am compiling a list of suggestions that we will discuss regularly so that we can serve you better.

Please keep the feedback coming!