History advocates left with questions after meeting

DES MOINES - The largest assessment of the State Historical Society of Iowa's 157-year-old archives still is far from complete. But some members of the public and society's board of trustees already are concerned with a lack of communication and transparency from the state.

Board member Richard Thomas of Cedar Rapids said the unanswered questions regarding the Department of Cultural Affairs's master planning process and the more than $855,000 contract with New York-based firm Lord Cultural Resources to assess the entire state department ultimately falls on members of the public, who are left in the dark.

'I do think that we're losing a kind of credibility with the public,” Thomas said during a Tuesday public meeting in Des Moines the included the board and officials of the department - the governing agency for the State Historical Society.

'We have no unity, and that's tragic. We're the public stewards of the history of this state, and I'm ashamed.”

With historians around the state expressing concerns in recent weeks over reduced hours, declining staffing and murmurs that state officials are considering a consolidation of the society's research libraries in Iowa City and Des Moines into one facility, representatives with Cultural Affairs attempted to clear the air.

Deputy Director of Cultural Affairs Chris Kramer said a contributing factor to a lack of available information is that the master planning and assessment processes are still underway. Official decisions on matters involving staffing, collections or future plans with the society in general remain undetermined, he said.

'For us to say we're going to do this or that or the other is premature,” Kramer said.

State Archivist Anthony Jahn said earlier this month that completing the assessment of the state's more than 40,000 cubic feet of historic items remains his top priority. But he added that there are no current plans in place to diminish the state's historic content.

That said, in the list of considerations from the most recent evaluation report by Lord Cultural Resources is a recommendation to consolidate facilities in Des Moines and Iowa City so the society can focus on more online services.

Other concerns raised at the meeting included reduced hours at the Des Moines and Iowa City facilities, as well as the state's declining staff, which is ranked 45th in the country for the ratio of full-time staff to cubic feet of non-electronic archival holdings, according to the Lord Cultural Resources report.

'It implies that we are not even remotely in the ballpark now with the number of people,” board member and Sioux City resident Kitty Green said.

The next big update on the assessment will come this summer, Cultural Affairs officials said, but a completed assessment of all collections isn't anticipated to be finished until 2018,

Back in Iowa City, Tyler Priest, associate professor of history and geography with the University of Iowa, has begun circulating an online petition so residents can show their support for the Iowa City archives in the Centennial Building, at 402 Iowa Ave.

The petition had nearly 650 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.

'We felt that we just needed to make our voice heard and make it clear how important access to the physical records are,” Priest said.

Some 20 members of the public attended the Tuesday meeting in the State of Iowa Historical Building in Des Moines in what board chairman William Bartine described as one of the larger crowds for such as meeting in recent memory.