Behind the Centennial Building in downtown Iowa City on Monday morning, workers began to load a truck with parts of the collections housed in the research facility and archives of the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI), the building’s occupant since 1956.
SHSI announced on June 17 that it would close the Iowa City facility, taking historians, researchers and others interested in state and local history by surprise. There had been no attempt to solicit public input about the decision, or any advance warning that such a major change was under consideration. Even the SHSI Board of Trustees hadn’t been consulted.
Eliminating the Iowa City facility appears to be a violation of state law. Iowa Code states the SHSI, which was founded in Iowa City in 1857, “shall… Maintain research centers in Des Moines and Iowa City.”
During the board’s June meeting, SHSI administrator Valerie Van Kooten said the planned closure was a response to a projected shortfall in its FY 2027 budget, which takes effect July 1, 2026. According to Van Kooten, SHSI leadership had only been given a few weeks to come up with a solution to its budget problem.
State Archivist Tony Jahn has defended the decision to shutter the Centennial Building, claiming that combining the material in Iowa City with that in the SHSI’s other facility, the archives in Des Moines, will result in improved efficiency for the historical society. Jahn has said the plan is to eventually digitize the Iowa City material, making it more accessible to the public.
There’s no timetable for the digitizing Jahn talks about, and the SHSI, part of the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, is typically underfunded and short of staff. And more importantly, the SHSI plans to move just a portion of the Centennial Building’s 34,700 cubic feet of archival materials, which includes thousands of books, more than a century’s worth of newspapers and county records, as well as manuscripts, letters, photos and maps donated to the SHSI and a repository of oral histories.
As for the material that won’t be moved to the Des Moines archives, Jahn has said the SHSI will have discussions with other institutions that might be interested in them, but has not provide details. The current approach will result in a significant percentage of the material being deaccessioned, i.e. removed, from the SHSI’s archive, one way or another.
Mary Bennett estimates the Des Moines facility will only be able to accommodate 40 percent of that material. Bennett, is a former special collections coordinator who worked at the Iowa City facility for 49 years before retiring in 2023, is currently one of the leaders of Save Iowa History 2025, a group of concerned scholars and citizens pushing for SHSI to reverse its decision about the Iowa City facility. Or at least, follow basic professional standards in how it handles the closure of the Centennial Building.
“Every Iowan should wake up and pay attention to what’s going on,” Mary Bennett said, standing outside the Centennial Building, following the conclusion of the “Save Iowa History: Reverse the Decision” rally on Aug. 23. “This is a nonpartisan issue.”
More than 200 people attended the rally held at the Iowa City Public Library, and most of them participated in the mock funeral procession that followed. Members of COGS, the union representing graduate students at the University of Iowa, led the procession, wearing black and carrying a prop coffin. “Make way for the death of Iowa history,” members of the procession called out, as the COGS band, accompanied by Iowa music icon Dave Moore, played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” as the long train of mourners followed the sidewalks from the library to the Centennial Building.
“It’s an educational resource we don’t want to lose,” Bennett said as the prop coffin was laid in front of the Centennial Building’s doors. “Because if you desecrate and dismantle it, you can’t resurrect it. That’s the point of the coffin.”
Professional organizations like the Society of American Archivists have standards for how to handle the transfer or deaccession of archival collections. Moving or removing collections requires thorough studies of those collections, the condition of the materials within a collection, and how a collection relates to other collections in the archive. That hasn’t happened.
Just moving the archival material poses special challenges, as UI archivist emeritus David McCartney explained in a July letter to Little Village opposing the closure of the Centennial Building. Archival materials require special treatment when moved and stored to prevent damage.
Thousands of items in the Centennial Building “will be at risk of damage if not handled properly,” McCartney wrote. “It is not known what provision, if any, has been made to adequately prepare these materials for transfer.”
“Access to these holdings will be compromised during what promises to be a long and arduous transfer process. One would hope that there will be at minimum a paper/digital trail documenting these transfers so that researchers will be redirected to their new destinations. So far, however, no assurance of such accountability has been forthcoming by those who made this decision.”
Rather than hiring movers with proper training for the job, SHSI has gone with the low-cost option of hiring prison labor supplied by Iowa Prison Industries (IPI).
Mary Bennett and a few COGS members stood on the sidewalk by the back of Centennial Building on Monday morning, despite an intermittent drizzle of rain, and watched as the IPI movers started their work.
“It’s concerning seeing those wooden pallets left outside in the humidity, in the rain,” Clara Reynen said, looking at the pallets behind the IPI moving truck.
Reyen, a COGS member who earned her Masters in Library and Information Science at UI and is completing an MFA in Book Arts at the UI Center for the Book (also a candidate for the Iowa City Council), was concerned about the damage moisture from damp pallets could do to paper. The Iowa State Troopers supervising the movers had told Bennett and COGS members to remain on the sidewalk, so there was no opportunity for Reyen to talk to the workers.
“There are 660 newspaper titles in 10,000 volumes, still in their original forms” in the Centennial Building, Bennett told Little Village. “The only ones [State Archivist Tony Jahn] promises to keep are the rag-paper ones from the 1860 and ’70s.”
The paper material in the Iowa City facility goes well beyond the archived newspapers, and the Iowa City research facility had special equipment to maintain those records.
“There’s a fully outfitted paper conservation lab in this building,” Bennett said. The only other two such labs in the state, she explained, are at UI and Iowa State University. Those labs are for university use only.
“With a collection as fragile as this, this institution needs to have a conservator onsite,” Bennett continued. But because of years of budgets cuts and underfunding, the Iowa City research facility has not had a full-time on-staff paper conservator since the last one took early retirement in 2008.
“Since then, I brought in people on grants to do conservation work,” Bennett said. “Because collections are fragile.”
Bennett is concerned that the schedule for removing the material from the Centennial Building has been accelerated, and a substantial portion of it will be gone by the time a Johnson County District Court holds a hearing next week on a temporary injunction to stop the dismantling of the Iowa City research center.
The motion seeking the injunction asks the court to stop the removal of materials from the Centennial Building and order SHSI to return what has been removed. It is part of a lawsuit, Stromquist et al. v. SHSI et al., seeking to reverse SHSI’s decision to shutter the Iowa City facility.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of 17 plaintiffs, including historians such as UI’s Linda Kerber, archivists including Mary Bennett and David McCartney, as well as individuals whose family members have donated material to the SHSI with the understanding it was to be kept in the Iowa City facility.
The lawsuit argues the closure violates the section of Iowa Code requiring SHSI to maintain an Iowa City research facility, state administrative rules and a legal settlement SHSI entered into in 1983. The lawsuit has support from numerous scholars and other concerned citizens, and professional organizations, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society of American Archivists and the American Historical Association (AHA), have issued statement calling on the state to reverse the decision.
In a letter addressed to Gov. Kim Reynolds, the AHA calls the Iowa City research facility “a crucial resource for anyone looking to participate in the documentation and practical use of Iowa’s past.”
“The decision to close the research center has been made without sufficient public input and without concrete plans for conserving, preserving, and providing continued access to the entirety of the SHSI’s collections,” the letter states. “We urge Iowa officials to halt the planned closure and to undertake a full review of the needs of the SHSI and the communities it serves. … Future generations rely upon public officials to defend the institutions that preserve our heritage and to support programs that promote history education and public interest in the past.”
The letter points to the importance of keeping the archive in Iowa City, and its importance to the state’s flagship university.
“Situated at the edge of the University of Iowa campus, the SHSI is used daily by students, faculty, and members of the public, all of whom rely upon not only the collections of the SHSI, but also on the expertise of its staff.”
Standing on the damp sidewalk beside the Centennial Building on Monday morining as Iowa Prison Industry workers moved items into their truck, Mary Bennett reflected on the research center and the Iowa City community.
“It really was a public-private partnership,” she said. “We relied on really smart retirees and student interns to do our work with us and learn. And that what’s important about the Iowa City location is we had the opportunity to train cultural workers in historic preservation, in museum studies programs.”
The emergency hearing for a temporary injunction is scheduled to take place at the Johnson County Courthouse on Tuesday, Oct. 14 at 9:30 a.m. It will be open to the public, and Save Iowa History 2025 is encouraging anyone interested to attend.
