As Iowa City braces itself for more flooding, library staff who aren’t busy with volunteer sandbagging for the city have been working on flood-proofing library basements, securing stored holdings and clearing away debris. Alas, these measures are insufficient in the case of the Music and Art Libraries, situated near the banks of the Iowa River. With these branches closed for the immediate future, those of us at Main Library have been making room to provide temporary office space for our displaced colleagues and their student assistants.

For DLS, the storms have brought a silver lining in the form of the early arrival of our new staff member Anne Shelley, formerly a graduate assistant at the Music Library. Thanks to the floods, Anne will be starting a few weeks early on her two-year appointment as a Digital Projects Librarian specializing in music collections. Stay tuned for more information on Anne and her work; in the meantime, enjoy these images of floods past from the Iowa Digital Library.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian, Digital Library Services

Flooding on Iowa River Drive, late 1800s. [Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes Digital Collection]

Riding the streetcar to N. Dubuque St. during the flood of 1918. [Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection]

Burlington St. Bridge during the flood of 1918. [Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection]

Delivering milk by canoe on N. Dubuque St. during the flood of 1929. [Irving Weber’s Iowa City Digital Collection]

Building a dike near the Student Union during the flood of 1947. [Iowa City Town and Campus Scenes Digital Collection]

Aerial view of UI athletic fields during the flood of 1993. [Geoscience Slides Digital Collection]