The Joseph Smith Papers Project is the most ambitious scholarly project ever undertaken on the Restoration’s primary sources. Active since 2001, the project’s aim is to publish every extant document from Joseph Smith and his contemporaries — revelations as recorded in their earliest known manuscript witnesses, Joseph’s journals, his outgoing and incoming correspondence, the official Church histories produced during his lifetime, the manuscripts of the Joseph Smith Translation, administrative records, and the legal and business documents that record his participation in his world.
The published volumes are organized into series. Revelations and Translations publishes the revelation manuscripts (printer’s manuscripts, the original revelation book, the Book of Mormon’s printer’s manuscript, the JST manuscripts) in critical editions with photographic facsimiles and transcriptions. Journals publishes Joseph Smith’s journals in three volumes covering 1832–1844. Documents publishes the wider documentary record — letters, papers, public statements — organized chronologically. Histories publishes the histories produced under Joseph’s direction. Administrative Records publishes the formal records of Church government and administration. Legal, Business, and Financial Records publish the documents from those domains.
The project’s significance for both scholarly and devotional Latter-day Saint study is hard to overstate. The canonical revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants can be studied against their earliest known manuscript witnesses, with the project’s editorial notes explaining textual variants and historical contexts. The Book of Mormon’s printer’s manuscript — the dictated text in the hand of Oliver Cowdery and others — is now accessible in critical edition. Joseph Smith’s daily journals provide a contemporaneous record of the Restoration’s central decade.
The project is freely accessible online at josephsmithpapers.org, with full-text search across all published material, photographic facsimiles of the original manuscripts, and the full editorial apparatus. It is the standard primary-source archive for Restoration history and serves as the basis for most current scholarly engagement with the period.