A Massive Archiving Effort at National Parks (with Jenny McBurney and Lynda Kellam)

If you’ve been to a national park in the U.S. recently, you might have noticed some odd new signs about “beauty” and “grandeur.” Or, some signs you were used to seeing might now be missing completely. An executive order issued earlier this year put the history and educational aspects of the parks system under threat–but a group of librarians stepped in to save it. 

This week we have a conversation between Sam and two of the leaders of the independent volunteer archiving project Save Our Signs, an effort to archive national park signs and monument placards. It’s a community collaboration project co-founded by a group of librarians, public historians, and data experts in partnership with the Data Rescue Project and Safeguarding Research & Culture. 

Lynda Kellam leads the Research Data and Digital Scholarship team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is a founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project. Jenny McBurney is the Government Publications Librarian and Regional Depository Coordinator at the University of Minnesota Libraries. In this episode, they discuss turning “frustration, dismay and disbelief” at parks history under threat into action: compiling more than 10,000 images from over 300 national parks into a database to be preserved for the people.

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/xrCElwgY5Co

• ‘Save Our Signs’ Archive and Submission Site

• 'Save Our Signs' Wants to Save the Real History of National Parks Before Trump Erases It

• ‘Save Our Signs’ Preservation Project Launches Archive of 10,000 National Park Signs

• Archivists Work to Identify and Save the Thousands of Datasets Disappearing From Data.gov

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