Cameroon. Cambodia. Croatia. Cyprus.

Despite their far-flung locations, geography, language and culture, each is now home to hundreds of Latter-day Saints after opening its doors to LDS missionaries during this decade. They're four of the 40-plus nations that have done so in the 1990s..

As The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues its march around the world, President Gordon B. Hinckley has repeatedly emphasized that its greatest challenge — and best opportunity — is growth.

For Kay Briggs, that challenge has become a literal forest. Last year, he was surrounded by 22 million pounds of paper — all of it destined to become scriptures, Sunday School manuals, hymnbooks, temple recommend forms, tithing envelopes and a thousand other things church members need to learn and live out their faith.

As director of the LDS Church's Salt Lake Printing Center, Briggs oversees the ever-growing number of publications — in nearly 100 languages — that come off several different presses to be sorted, packaged and shipped to nearly every corner of the globe.

Even so, the center produces only about 62 percent of all church materials used worldwide. Many are printed in foreign nations where membership is established and adequate facilities are available, Briggs said.

This year, the Salt Lake center has been working at "107 percent of capacity; we're full (with storage of materials) right now and we just can't do any more."

But that will change soon, Briggs said, with the addition of a 168,500-square-foot automated storage and distribution facility to be constructed beginning in June next to the LDS Distribution Center on 1700 South west of Redwood Road.

"That will give us an additional 15,000 storage racks where we can put a full pallet of materials (waiting to be shipped). By going to a high-bay storage, we're getting a lot more capacity handled on a much faster system."

Briggs sees the day coming soon when branch presidents, bishops, stake presidents and even individual church members will order scriptures, manuals or magazines via Internet. "Once the order is place, robots inside the distribution facility will locate the desired item and send it to the correct address.

With the new facility in place, "we'll only have to take their ordering information once, then it will go into the computer and we can ship things automatically the next time they order," bypassing repeated human transmission of the information and eliminating not only tedious jobs, but the repeated chance for error.

Once the new center is complete, "it will effectively double our capacity" in terms of production, freeing up space inside the existing center that is now used for storage to accommodate additional presses and production areas.

Among the thousands of pallets of materials produced in the plant every year, the thing Briggs gets most excited about is scriptures.

He said they're the first thing that translation teams work on when a new country is opened to missionary work, with selected sections of the Book of Mormon paving the way for other key materials to follow.

Last year, 28 percent of the paper used at the printing center went into scriptures — nearly 22 percent of it into copies of the Book of Mormon alone.

"And no one safeguards the scriptures like the First Presidency," Briggs said. "They've determined that we're going to show a respect for the scriptures" by producing the fine, leather-bound versions that previously have been done "only by craftsmen in England and Boston."

For years, the church has produced a wide variety of covers for the scriptures to provide for a variety of needs: everything from sturdy missionary versions to the hard- and soft-cover copies of the Book of Mormon that missionaries distribute.

Part of the space that will open up in the printing center once the new facility is complete will at some point be used to produce a fine, leather-bound scripture quad that is becoming increasingly difficult to get from private sources, Briggs said.

"The number of craftsman that do this kind of work has dropped dramatically in the past 20 years. If we want to do that kind of work, we're going to have to do it in-house."

Church leaders are also concerned about making the scriptures "user-friendly," he said. "There's an ongoing effort to make the scriptures fit in the palm of your hand, so you'll use them and feel comfortable with them."

And more Latter-day Saints than ever before will have that feel, as the church continues its push for translation.

In the last two years, translation on the full Book of Mormon was completed in Cebuano and Tagalog (Philippines), as well as Romanian and Ukrainian, with selections of the book in Bikolano (Philippines), Navajo and American Sign Language. Full translations of the book are currently being produced in Malagasy (Madagascar) and Shona (Zimbabwe and Mozambique).