The Heritage Health Index, published in 2005, was a major effort to assess the state of the collections in institutions across the country. The recent state-level IMLS Connecting to Collections grants are based on this work.
With the recipients just announced and planning getting underway, this is the time to ensure that these state-level efforts don’t repeat one of the major problems with the Heritage Health Index: Significantly under-representing small historical societies, often the sole local history archive for their communities.
The Heritage Health Index (HHI) was created and developed by Heritage Preservation, a national non-profit organization, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency. They in turn drew on 35 associations and federal agencies that cover collecting institutions.
The study (below) included this breakdown for historical societies:
Size classification for historical societies based on their annual budget
- Large: $1.5 million and above
- Medium: $1.5 million to $500,000
- Small: Less than $500,000
Although “small” institutions made up 74% of the entire study population, my research on historical societies in New England shows that very, very few institutions have budgets of even one tenth of the lowest threshold. As a result, the vast majority of local historical societies were grouped with institutions ten times their size in the “small” category.
The studies that are getting underway at the state level should include state-specific size categories that capture the very small, and usually all-volunteer, historical societies by using a much lower threshold for “small” institutions.
This is critical in order to accurately assess the state of the collections and collection management at these institutions, which often hold the entire historical archive for their village or town.
This can be challenging in even the most basic way: Identifying the institutions. In Massachusetts, for example, there is no authoritative comprehensive list, and securing a timely response from an all-volunteer organization is also challenging.
This is underscored by the HHI study, which was distributed to more than 14,500 archives, libraries, historical societies, museums, archeological repositories, and scientific research collections in every state and territory. Overall the response rate was 24%; the response rate for the 500 largest institutions was 90%.
The Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections
One Comment
Dear Lee-
Thanks for reporting on the Heritage Health Index. You are quite right that many historical societies and history museums fall below the budget limit of $500,000 in the “small” category. However, the reason we used this definition of “small” would be so that Heritage Health Index data could be comparable to previous studies conducted by IMLS and the American Association of Museums.
At http://www.heritagepreservation.org/HHI/datasmall.html is some data specific to “small institutions” and even given our rather broad definition, it points to many areas of need for the improved collections care.
As you rightly say, perhaps the state-based surveys that will be conducted as part of the Connecting to Collections Statewide Planning grants will be able to include even more local institutions and break the data out further. I’ve often heard it said that there should be two categories, “small” and “very small”, to most accurately represent all the repositories of historical artifacts.
Kristen Laise (director of the Heritage Health Index at Heritage Preservation)
One Trackback
[...] of the shortcomings of past efforts, including the national Heritage Health Index (described in this post), was the under-representation of smaller institutions, including the many local historical [...]