The internet is a chaotic place, especially if you are looking for resources within a specialized area, such as the Latter-day Restoration movement founded by Joseph Smith. The many important resources relating to Latter-day Saint faith and scripture are scattered, poorly organized, improperly indexed, unsearchable, or unavailable in digital formats. General purpose search engines produce long lists of irrelevant information, often overlooking the critical documents hidden away on obscure websites and totally missing those resources that are only available in book or other physical format.

Gospel Scholar Index (GSI) make it easier to discover, explore, and download the many kinds of resources specifically related to the Restoration movement. It is an index that brings together the resources scattered across the internet into one cohesive listing of those documents most used by scholars, gospel doctrine teachers, and individual researchers.

Features

• Comprehensive, focused collection — GSI indexes those resources most relevant to scholarly research both online and only available offline. It does not attempt to index the multitude of Come, Follow Me podcasts and other general-interest resources.
  
• Multi-format citations — Each index citation can include links to multiple online formats: text, PDF, images, videos, audio, meta data about the document, and bookstores that sell physical copies.
  
• Focused search — GSI includes both basic and advanced search functions that find the most relevant resources, regardless of where they are located, replacing the often ineffective or overly complex search engines found on individual websites.
  
• Catalogs existing online collections — GSI is not an archive of documents, competing with other websites. Rather, it indexes the existing website collections of relevant documents, wherever they are on the internet
  
• Content searches of copyrighted materials — A searchable “shadow archive” of copyrighted books and other resources allows people to perform content searches without violating copyrights.
  

The precursor of Gospel Scholar Index began at The Interpreter Foundation with a PDF bibliography of books and articles by and about Hugh Nibley. At the same time, the Maxwell Institute moved all of its FARMS materials to BYU’s Scholar’s Archive, leading to consternation about the loss of this online resource. Building on these foundations, an online, searchable bibliography with links to resources, wherever they were on the Internet, became part of the Interpreter Foundation website. When the Interpreter website was rebuilt in 2025, it was decided to not include the bibliographies. While the initial development of the software and database were funded by The Interpreter Foundation, Gospel Scholar Index is not owned, controlled by, or officially affiliated with the Foundation.