In a dusty dance hall somewhere in small-town southern Utah, Stuart Preece was opening every door, checking behind every little cranny and fighting the darkness in his search.
Finally, in a back room dimly lit by one fading light bulb, Preece made his find — 60 boxes stacked full of documents from the 1930s.
Town officials anxiously wanted Preece to examine the papers and tell them what to do.
If it is painful for you to sift through a box in the basement and decide what has a permanent place in your heart and what can make its way into a Hefty bag, Preece's job is not for you.
He figures a maximum of 5 percent of the records generated by government are worth keeping.
"It is that angst that people suffer over what to keep" that, truthfully, Preece doesn't encounter in his job.
An archivist with the state of Utah for the past four years, he has a great respect for records and the history they represent — but will readily tell you only a few records actually tell a story.
Meetings from a city council meeting? A must keep. Land deeds, mining claims, incorporation records and fingerprint cards are also ones they want to hang onto.
Water cooler purchases? Never mind. Ditto for attendance records at a local school district.
Preece will tell you any document that describes the institutional history of a government entity is the one that archivists want to hang onto.
In the southern Utah case, officials were wondering whether they should keep receipts from purchases.
"When you boil it down, there are certain documents that tell the story of that agency, that city or that town," Preece said.
Preece is the architect of an ambitious project undertaken by State Archives to record the documents of all of Utah's 29 counties and their cities and towns.
After more than two years, he and partner Pat Scott, also a state archivist, have completed nine counties, including 75 cities and towns and 27 school districts. They've gone through 873 rolls of microfilm documenting everything from minutes of meetings to burial records and financial audits.
He admits it feels like it is going to take them 100 years to complete, but they're driven by an intense motivation to preserve the history of these counties through their documents.
"We found the state is losing a lot of this information," he said. "If the documents are missing from 1940 to 1980, we can't reconstruct that unless we find it under someone's bed."
The Millennial Government Project is being conducted in conjunction with Utah State University in Logan and Southern Utah University in Cedar City, where space is provided for the microfilming and management of the records.
Recently, Preece headed to Plymouth in Box Elder County. Last month, the two of them visited eight towns in Washington County as part of the project.
Without exception, Preece says they are greeted warmly by town officials, especially those from small towns who are anxious to get the information organized and preserved.
"They're really excited about us preserving this because they worry about it, too," he said. "A lot of the documents are starting to disintegrate."
It is a painstaking process.
In some cases, Preece boxes up the documents, brings them back to Salt Lake City and arranges them in chronological order. The documents are then filmed, cataloged and eventually returned to city officials.
More often than not, Preece runs into documents that have been held onto for years but are not the type of records that need to be preserved. Town officials, perhaps anxious to make room in cramped offices, are relieved to hear they can toss them.
"An historian would want to keep everything, but we want to keep those documents that we feel tell the story of an agency, how they reached the decisions they did — the preservation of a corporate memory, if you will," he said. "After a time, you get a good feeling about what to keep and what to throw away. It is not a science, but an art."
E-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com