[yeahbutbut]

That strikes me as being less about controlling the message and more about making sure that the people entering the library know how to handle manuscripts that old (especially the part about not allowing undergraduates...). Digitizing the works opens them up to everyone anyway so it's not as though they're withholding anything for reasons other than lack of the resources to digitize the entire collection (hey, contribute!).

If they wanted to hide something it wouldn't be in a library anyway, it would have been burned or stashed in a private vault somewhere.

That quote seems more like standard preservation concerns, and exactly what I would say if I had a museum of 400+ year old paper documents that I didn't want destroyed by people without adequate respect for their history.

[apaprocki]

See my sister comment -- I would also add not everything in church history in the archives is a 1400 AD vellum manuscript. It's great that they put 4,000 manuscripts online, but the library has tens of kilometers of shelving.

There have also been past events in history that disagree with what you are saying. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_the_Congregation_fo...