Indiana’s state archives, original and irreplaceable paperwork documenting the people’s business since before statehood, got rained on a few weeks ago — for the third time this year.

A fourth time seems inevitable.

Among the most treasured documents are the state constitution; the earliest state Supreme Court cases; John Dillinger’s prison records; and the contract, from 1964, between the Indiana State Fair Board and the Beatles.

The building that houses them, built nearly four decades ago by RCA as a warehouse for eight-track tapes, has a leaky roof. And while Indiana’s Department of Administration has scheduled some patch-up work in the coming days, people familiar with the building say the roof surely will leak again — as it has for the past decade, despite repeated repairs.

The recent soaking — 30 boxes of House and Senate bills from the 1960s — was discovered promptly, and the documents were dried out and saved. They’ve been returned to their shelves and covered by sheets of clear plastic.

There is no other help in sight. The Department of Administration hoped to put a new roof on the building this year and included in its budget $2.4 million for that purpose.

But Gov. Mitch Daniels killed that plan. “In December 2008, we got a revenue forecast that showed we had a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar hole in our budget,” said the governor’s spokeswoman, Jane Jankowski. “Beginning right then and there, we had to make a lot of decisions about what we could and couldn’t spend.”

Later, Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, introduced into the budget bill $500,000 for an architectural study of a new building to house the archives, something that’s been talked about since the turn of the century. The allocation did not survive the Senate budget committee.

“I didn’t get the job done in making clear how precarious this situation is,” Pierce said. "Unfortunately it got put into the category: ’It’d be nice, but it’s not a necessity.’ "

Every state maintains an archive. The General Assembly mandated Indiana’s in the early 20th century.

Its documents often are yellowed and brittle, but they are useful on many levels: to family genealogists (Pierce has traced his people back to the 1600s); to historians; even to real estate developers, who sometimes must use old aerial photographs to confirm a property’s past uses.

Compared with many states, Indiana skimps on its archives. Its staff of eight is larger than the staffs of just 12 states, according to a 2007 report by the Council of State Archivists; its $500,000-a-year-budget is among the nation’s lowest.

Budgets to store and maintain historical documents vary widely from state to state, because some archivists are responsible for every county’s documents while others are primarily concerned with state business. Iowa’s budget was $434,000, according to the CSA’s study; Washington state’s was $10 million.

Indiana’s building, said Jerry Handfield, Washington state’s archivist and a board member of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, is “an accident waiting to happen.”

He speaks with authority — he has visited half the states’ archives and, in the 1990s, was Indiana’s archivist.

The old eight-track repository, on East 30th Street, initially was intended as temporary quarters. The archives needed to be cleared out of the basement of the State Library, where they’d been since 1932, because the basement was being remodeled.

That was in 2001.

Leaks aren’t the only worry, said Pierce, who notes that several tornadoes have touched down near the building. The way he sees it, “we’re at a point now where we’re one day closer to a disaster.”

Pierce said he plans to bring up the issue again in the next legislative session.