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 archive 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 identify and remove signs that discuss slavery, Indigenous history, and the climate crisis if they were deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or promote a “corrosive ideology.” Recognizing that these signs represent publicly funded information, McBurney and volunteers sought to preserve them before potential removal.

"One goal, of course, is to take pictures of the signs before they’re removed so we have a record of them," McBurney said. "But a second goal is that we want to engage the public and make sure that people know that this is happening and ask them: What do you think about this?"

Isabelle Boelter, a library assistant at the University of Minnesota, described Save Our Signs as an opportunity to confront and protect history targeted for erasure. "In a lot of helpless moments, we look for control and look for something to put our hands into," she said. "Save Our Signs is that opportunity and chance: it allows us to face the history that the administration is trying to remove and disappear, and instead, we’re able to help protect it."

Volunteers have documented “before” photos of signs confirmed to have been removed or altered at locations 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.

The project has even influenced travel plans, with a family rerouting a road trip from Minneapolis to Montana 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 spanning Nebraska and South Dakota.

This initiative follows earlier efforts by McBurney and others who joined the Data Rescue Project to archive government datasets threatened with deletion by the Trump administration due to content on gender ideology, environmental justice, and diversity.

Sources

Guardian US