Report: “They Hold These Truths: Minnesota’s Archive of Endangered National Park Signs Tops 11,000 and Counting”

From The Minnesota Star-Tribune:

Historians and librarians at the University of Minnesota launched Save Our Signs this summer. There is no central database of national park signs, so they asked the public to send in their own photos from the parks, historic sites, monuments, memorials, battlefields, seashores that make up the National Park Service.

“This is information that belongs to the people and they should be able to access it and learn from it,” said historian Kirsten Delegard, co-founder of the Mapping Prejudice Project. “To me, this feels like a direct attempt to take the full force of the federal government to erase all the nuance. Just completely erase it. Make it inaccessible.”

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Again and again, people question Jenny McBurney, government publications librarian and coordinator of the U’s massive regional depository of government documents: Do you really want a picture of every sign? I’m not sure if this is the sort of sign they might remove.

“We want all signs,” said McBurney, who snapped her own photos of every sign she could find at Independence Hall National Historical Park during a recent trip to Philadelphia. “It doesn’t matter if you think it’s at risk, because we don’t know if it’s at risk.”

Learn More, Read the Complete Article (about 875 words)

Direct to Save Our Signs (SOS) Archive

Direct to Save Our Signs Project Website (SOS)

Direct to SOS FAQs

See Also: Digital Collections: Save Our Signs Archive Containing Over 10,000 Photos of National Park Service (NPS) Interpretive Materials Launches Online (October 13, 2025)

Filed under: Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, News