State assessment of Iowa’s historical items complete

IOWA CITY - Officials say the first major assessment of Iowa's more than 40,000 cubic feet of historic items has been completed, but much work remains to update the state's largest collection of history.

Sitting last week in the State Historical Society of Iowa's Centennial Building in Iowa City, Anthony Jahn, state archivist with the Department of Cultural Affairs, said the six-month, all-encompassing collection assessment is just one of many steps to ultimately create the future of SHSI and open accessibility to the society's 209 million content pages and objects.

'The bottom line is ... how to we take what we have and what we're going to have, and how do we position that to benefit Iowans down the road and others who visit the state?” Jahn said. 'And critical to that is that we balance the accessibility with the preservation.”

The plan over the next 18 months is to create a detailed collecting plan, draft collection initiative priorities and form a timeline and budget, Jahn said.

Basically, the next year and a half will be spent creating the game plan for how SHSI will operate and achieve the goal of connecting Iowa residents and visitors with the state's history.

One major goal is to increase efforts to catalog and digitize the hundreds of millions of items in archives, Jahn said.

According to the collection evaluation, only 71 percent of the society's almost 26 million newspapers, 3 percent of the 114 million items in archives and less than 1 percent of both the 1.5 million photographs and 20.7 million manuscripts in collections have been formally cataloged.

'It's going to take a decade; the collections are that large and there is that much to do,” Jahn said.

Tyler Priest, associate professor of history and geography with the University of Iowa, said there still are frustrations over a lack of information on exactly what the DCA intends to do with the society.

'It's not clear what happens next on their part. They're not saying anything,” Priest said. 'They just won't tell us things. It's a model example of how they operate.”

That said, efforts are being made to increase communication between DCA officials and those like Priest, who have been critical of the department particularly over the assessment and reduced hours at the Des Moines and Iowa City centers.

'That's a positive sign there,” Priest said.

To perform the assessment, DCA, which oversees the State Historical Society of Iowa, earlier this year reduced public hours by 40 percent at the Des Moines and Iowa City State Historical Society of Iowa centers. Jahn noted Friday that two part-time employees recently had been hired at the Iowa City building.

In the months that followed, many historians and genealogists expressed concerns that not only would the reduction in hours limit access to the historic records, but that the move foreshadowed future cutbacks for SHSI.

In April, a petition from nearly a dozen history academics across the state directed to DCA and Gov. Terry Branstad expressed similar concerns 'about recent cuts and the uncertain future of the State Historical Society of Iowa.”

Two months later, the discussion moved to the national spotlight when a letter from the Washington-based American Historical Association - also directed to DCA and Branstad - expressed similar concerns.

Jahn said that, at least for now, shutting down the Iowa City facility is not on the table.

'There is no plan to shut it down, I will say there are no guarantees about anything, but right now, there is no plan to close this building at this particular point.”