(Radio Iowa) – A history journal that’s been produced by the State of Iowa for 163 years must find a new editorial home. An Iowa Department of Administrative Services spokesman says due to an increasingly lean staff, the State Historical Society will not produce the Annals of Iowa after July 1st of next year. Iowa State University history professor Pamela Riney-Kehrberg has been an editorial consultant for the journal and she’s worried.

“My students read articles out of ‘Annals of Iowa’ every single semester and they love them,” she said. “I want my students to understand that the history that we’re talking about on the national level happened here and nobody else is going to publish that if this journal ceases to be.” The very first edition of the Annals of Iowa — from 1863 — had 10 articles, including a letter describing how Iowa soldiers in Kentucky removed a five pound chain from the neck of a slave who had escaped.

Riney-Kehrberg, whose research focuses on rural and agricultural history, wrote an article about what it was like to be a farm kid in Iowa between 1880 and 1920 for a more recent Annals of Iowa. “Every single article in it has something to do with the state and local history of this place,” Riney-Kehrberg said, “and it has been doing this since the Civil War.” The Annals of Iowa is published quarterly. State officials say printing costs are largely covered by about 300 subscribers and part of the annual fees from about 100 Historical Society of Iowa members.

According to Riney-Kehrberg, nearly every single state published a historical journal at some point, but few remain. “Which is all the more reason for us to keep it because this is an award-winning, highly respected journal,” she says, “which has had a series of exceptionally good editors.” The Department of Administration Services is willing to have the State Historical Society as the copyright holder, but is hoping to strike arrangement similar to what’s happened with the Kansas History journal, which is edited and published by the history department at Kansas State University.

Riney-Kehrberg says moving the Annals of Iowa to a college or university in Iowa could change how it’s perceived. “By having it with the state, down in Des Moines it meant that it was really for the whole state, but if you move it to a university there’s always the chance that people are going to say: ‘Oh, you’re favoring authors from X location or Y location,'” Riney-Kehrberg said, “even if you really aren’t.”

Digital copies of the Annals of Iowa from 1863 through 2022 are currently found on a state website and it has been published at a printing company in Monticello.