The University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (UI-OSA) is nine
months into a year-long pilot study that we hope will lead to big piles of
grant money to rehabilitate collections that need it.

The UI-OSA is charged with curating all of the public archaeological
collections from the state of Iowa, but of course it's only been in the
past ten or twenty years that professional curation standards have been
applied. The pilot study involves identifying the most significant and
worst-off collections for rehabilitation.

We're operationalizing 'significance' as "potentials for research and
education."  Research potential is a combination of collection size, range
of historically diagnostic artifacts, artifact diversity, no. of
publications using the collection, and the status of the site with respect
to National Register of Historic Places eligibility.  Education potential
is a combination of documentation completeness, presence of unique
objects, presence of non-local raw materials, diversity, and potential for
use in lab training activities.

Of course, we have the huge advantage of having relational databases that
document the provenances and conditions of the collections, their
contents, and the publications based upon them; some remedial data
collection has been necessary, but the advantage lies in the existing
infrastructure that makes the analysis a comparative breeze.

Cheers,
R. Johnson

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