Last July, Jenny McBurney, a government publications librarian at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues launched Save Our Signs, a crowdsourced initiative to photograph and document every sign in the more than 400 national parks and historic sites across the United States. This effort responds to a sweeping campaign by the Trump administration to censor American history and science within the National Park Service (NPS).

The administration instructed NPS rangers to flag and remove signs addressing topics such as slavery, Indigenous history, and the climate crisis if they were deemed to "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living" or promote a "corrosive ideology." McBurney noted that, like government datasets, these signs contain public information funded by taxpayers.

Volunteers with Save Our Signs have already documented "before" photos of signs at several parks where removals or alterations have been confirmed, including Acadia National Park, Cape Cod National Seashore, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historic Park, Gateway National Park, Independence National Park, Muir Woods National Monument, the National Mall, and Virgin Islands National Park.

Isabelle Boelter, a library assistant at the University of Minnesota, described the project as an opportunity to confront and protect history that the administration seeks to erase. McBurney emphasized the dual goals of the project: to preserve a record of the signs before removal and to engage the public in discussions about the portrayal of American history.

The initiative has even influenced personal plans, such as rerouting a family road trip to visit sites along the Niobrara National Scenic River in Nebraska and the Missouri National Recreational River, a 100-mile stretch of the Missouri River in Nebraska and South Dakota.

This project follows earlier efforts by McBurney and others who joined the Data Rescue Project to archive government datasets at risk of deletion due to content related to "gender ideology," environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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