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

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 4-4 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4-4 Media dot co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get early access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. And they get access to our interview series, like this one, too. Gain access to that content at 4-4 Media dot co. This week, we are joined by Linda Kellum and Jenny McBurney. Linda Kellum leads the Research, Data, and Digital Scholarship Team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is a founding organizer of the Data Rescue Project, which we're going to get into in this episode.

0:54And Jenny is the Government Publications Librarian and Regional Depository Coordinator at the University of Minnesota Libraries. thank you both for being here i'm so excited to talk about this project we cover archiving preservation and all that good stuff quite a bit for four so very excited to talk to some of the folks who do it every day um yeah so jenny do you want to say hi as people can recognize your voice i just realized we having a two-person interview podcast is a little different sure yeah um what should i say hi i'm jenny and linda hi i'm linda awesome thank you um Yeah, so both Jenny and Linda have been volunteering to help lead this independent project called Save Our Signs.

1:42It's something that I wrote about a couple months ago and then again last week when they launched the result of the archiving. And Save Our Signs is this really big, impressive effort to archive National Park signs and monument placards around the country. It's crowdsourced. It's community collaboration. It was co-founded by librarians, public historians, data experts, and all of this was done in partnership with the librarians at their respective universities, but also with the Data Rescue Project and Safeguarding Research and Culture, which are both doing really important work, especially following the Trump administration.

2:26And just in the few nine months that we've had so far, shockingly, as so much information, public information and data and just knowledge on the internet and IRL has gone down as a result of some of the orders that we're going to talk about today. So we'll get into that in a second. But tell us a little bit about yourselves before we dig into this project. How did you get into library sciences and data preservation? Linda, do you want to go first? Sure. I've been a data librarian since 2007, so I've been around for a while. And I actually started in a position similar to Jenny's, where I was not a regional coordinator, but I was part of the government information depository system as a librarian.

3:23I got into data librarianship because I was a political science major. So I'd been working in a PhD program for political science. I'd been working with data for a while, both qualitative and quantitative. And I decided I didn't really like political science much anymore. So I started looking around for career paths. And data librarianship seemed like a good use of my skills, especially at that time, because it was so early in that field. Um, uh, there weren't a lot of people who had skills with data, uh, in, in librarianship at the time. So I thought it was a good fit and decided to do it. And here I, here we are.

4:02Relevant, um, to where we're at today, for sure. I think everyone needs to take a political science course at this point. Um, very cool. Thank you for that. Jenny, how about you? Yeah. Um, well, it's a slightly similar origin story in that I also did, uh, poli sci as an undergrad degree. And while I was in my undergrad, my advisor was a faculty member and a librarian at the same time. And so I basically wanted to be her when I grew up. And so I went to library school, took the GovDoc class, bounced around in a couple of different liaison areas. Lately, I've ended up as the government publications librarian and it lends itself very well to looking at data and just like open resources and information that everyone in the public should be able to access.

4:58Yeah. So all of this just fits really well into all of my interests. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like everyone or so many people, especially in academia, I have that moment of like, I want to be that person. What are the steps, you know, that I take to be, you know, my mentor or someone that I look up to? Yeah, so you were both positioned pretty well for 2025 after that experience and building that knowledge base. And in March, we saw Trump sign this executive order titled, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Good start. Amazing title. What a banger. And in that order, it demanded that public officials make sure that things like monument placards and signs and things that you know you take for granted when you show up to like DC for example and you walk up to like the MLK memorial and you say here's a sign that someone wrote and decided to put there or even like a battlefield or something like that and it said that anything under the the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction basically which is a lot of stuff, would never attempt to address anything negative about American history and past or present.

6:38And instead, they should only ever acknowledge how beautiful and pretty America looks. I think the wording in the EO was beauty and grandeur. which is great love beauty and grandeur but there's a lot of american history that is not pretty to look at and that is important to know so this executive order demanded that those signs come down uh that said anything negative about america by september 17th and this was in march um so walk me through where you were when you heard about this order and what was like because you're coming from a very different mindset than a lot of people a lot of people were like well fuck that's crazy um you were you had a different reaction so i would love to hear just like where you were what you were doing at the time um and what your initial like first reaction was to hearing this?

7:45I can say that. So at that time, I was in the thick of the data rescue project work. So the first reaction in March was, what in the world are they talking about? This is just sheer frustration. But in March, it was really hard to kind of concentrate on what the implications would be, I think. And there was other things that we had to focus on. And so for me, it's dismay and frustration that they would. And I don't think these people, the people who wrote that, I don't think they go to national parks. They don't think they understand what is at national parks, that this isn't national parks aren't just natural areas that they are.

8:32They engage with our history of America. And so it was also a bit of, in addition to frustration, dismay, like disbelief in that they understand even what a national park is. Yeah, it's pretty clear from the wording that they don't understand. And I hadn't even thought of that, that they probably don't even get it. That it's not just a pretty place to look at where you might see a bear or something. It's actually like meant to be educational. There's a lot of different kinds of parks out there. Yeah, which I didn't even fully grasp until I started reporting on this. Jenny, what was your first like gut reaction to that?

9:17Yeah, at that point, I think it had been over 100 executive orders had come out since the beginning of the whole situation. And I remember reading the title of it and being like, whatever, I can't deal with this and just moving on with my life and did not pay attention until the secretarial order came out in May, May 20th. And so when the secretary of the interior made an order about what the specifics of the implementation of what this executive order would be, that's when I started paying attention. It was like, oh, this is actually going to do something bad. so yeah yeah and um and that order was i mean i um i saw that and um totally agree that at that point you're like okay people who are in charge of implementing this are taking it seriously and they're actually going to do it you know they're falling in line um so that was that was part of also the what um secretary doug burghum wrote in that order was this is how we're going to do it and how they were going to do it was partially they were going to start putting qr codes up next to park signs right am i remembering that correctly um well there and there's a sign that they required the parks to put up that had the qr code where you could report um signage that was disparaging so yes um yeah and i i saw one of those for the first time ever a month ago i think at the big prison that's on Governor's Island in New York, which has an incredibly dark history.

11:09And you have this sign here that's like, if you don't like what you're reading, snitch. It's like, no, the point is to learn about it and to know what happened here. It's a prison. It exists and it's preserved to remember that history. So, okay. So that's a really good point that the interior secretary was like, okay, we're going to actually do this. We're going to enforce this ridiculous yo about restoring truth and sanity. Scary enough. And then what was kind of the next step? Like, did you immediately go into like librarian mode and start thinking we have to do something? Or what was the next impulse you had?

11:50Yeah. Yeah. Independently, that was the interesting part. um uh so data rescue project started talking about ways that we could try and capture do a crowdsource effort to get um people taking pictures and submitting them and we went through several iterations we thought maybe just submit them to blue sky would be the easiest because we have a blue sky account um and then we tried to set up a uh another approach that did not we actually got ended up locked out of that approach for some reason i forget why um it was just it didn't work out. And I think that that's when we put out a call for assistance because we were just so frustrated trying to figure out what the mechanism would be for doing this.

12:33But my idea, or not my idea, but my goal for myself was that I wanted to turn the tactic on the administration. So if they were going to use QR codes to have people report these pictures, I wanted to have people report what they loved about pictures, you know, to kind of split the script a little bit. And that, once we put out a call on Mattermost, I think that's when Jenny saw that and was like, oh, we're already doing this. So cool that you were having like the same brainwave at the same time. So then Jenny, what were you working on over at, in Minnesota? Yeah, so pretty much the same conversations that we were having, like, okay, we got to do something about this.

13:21What are we going to do? What are the different ways that we could, what are the different tools that we could use? And for me, the specific turning point happened at an AI conference.

13:39I'm not the biggest fan of AI, but I was presenting at a panel there. And one of my co-panelists was Kirsten Delagard, who is the director of the Mapping Prejudice Project at the University of Minnesota. And I was like, Kirsten, I'm really bummed out about the national parks. And she was like, yeah, me too. And I was like, you know, Mapping Prejudice does all this really cool crowdsourcing community-based work. Could we do that for national park signs? And she was like, yes, let's do this. So we started trying different things, but we didn't really know how to like get things moving. And so that's when I was at a different conference, the ALA conference in Philadelphia.

14:20And I saw Linda's post in the Mattermost where we kind of chat about data rescue things. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is good. This is going to work. We found people who can help make this happen. Yeah. And so we had kind of settled on the idea of using a Qualtrics survey because, you know, working out of a university, we have access to these really powerful tools. Qualtrics is really great. And we chose it because folks can upload materials without like photos without having to log in with an email account. And we knew from having various conversations with people who work in the parks that anonymity was going to be a really important aspect of people wanting to participate in this project.

15:11And so we realized that this was going to be the best option from our end where we could collect the photos, but also information about the photos and keep that information really organized and also not create a barrier of people having to like say who they were, that they could just take their photo and submit it to the online form.

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19:08yeah and so if you're um if i'm at a park and i see a sign that i want to preserve and you were taking all signs right like it wasn't just like if you think this sign might be at risk it was like i saw signs for like astig island it was like oh that's nice like probably fine but like you know um keep it for sure um but people if you get to assign and you open the qualtrics link right and then you snap a photo and put in like what else is in the form that you were taking from people yeah um so they upload the photo they say yes i consent to put this into the project and put it into the public domain so that the photo can be reused they can also enter the title of the sign if they have time, if they feel inclined, or any additional information about it.

19:59Like it's located at this particular section of the park or it's located in this particular building in the park. And then they can also add the date and submit it. And so we tried to make it as short of a survey as possible to make it easier for people. And we also got a lot of help from folks through the data rescue project network of finding people who were really good at building accessible, good Qualtrics surveys specifically. And so getting help on that was really important too, to make sure that it was a usable tool. Yeah, for sure. You want as little friction as possible. Right. Do it as quickly as possible and get on your way.

20:43I think Linda mentioned something about this just now also, but like the decision to make it a crowdsourced effort you could have just said we have a network of people who have experience archiving and will like take the high quality photo and get the information we want you could have just said go out to your parks um and do this why did you decide to leave it up to the public to bring in all this data we we could we didn't have that reach i mean we knew that there was no way we could have the reach. And it was by the time we had started to get everything together, it was so close to July 4th that we wanted to capitalize on that, on the fact that people would be going out to parks.

21:28We had had a lot of luck with crowdsourcing the data rescue efforts. And so it didn't seem that this seemed like an easier lift for a lot of people who may be wanting to do something but weren't really feeling like they could do a data rescue because that does require some technical skill. So this was something that anybody could do. You can go take a picture and you can submit it onto a form. It's really not that hard. And so I think that was, one, it was just a matter of feasibility to be able to cover all of 300 parks or as many of those as possible. And then two, getting people the word out there about what was happening and how important national parks are and why we should care about this issue.

22:13I think that those are the two things that I see as the most important for that crowds were so immense. Yeah, a lot of the same thoughts and especially like the point that you made earlier about that, you know, this is what the administration was asking for the public to weigh in. Okay, well, then we're going to weigh in and we're going to show what we think is important. We, the people of America, are going to say that we think this is important and contribute to this collection of photos. Yeah, I, I, and I'm sorry for repeating myself to people who listen to the podcast, because I think I discussed the project before and they probably heard me say this before.

22:54But I think it's such an interesting exercise just in that muscle for people to to start looking and paying attention to things to not just understanding what an executive order like this can do. because signs did start going down even before i think september there were a couple signs that were i'm blanking on do you guys remember which one's the john mirror woods yeah yeah so it was like it was starting to happen and it probably is still happening um and i like i said i learned something about national parks like i didn't realize how huge the system was and i'm a national parks fan um and i think if you're not if you're not someone who's like super engaged on a lot of political issues maybe you can like appreciate that the parks are this other kind of like very um sacred thing that everyone is meant to enjoy um it's it seems like the least political thing in the world to go out and enjoy your local park um so i think like making people kind of flex that muscle a little bit is interesting and in a way that is very positive like you said it's um it's highlighting like what we love about having access to this information this education um not just like attempting to scramble to get it saved but like really appreciating it which i think was um not the goal probably but like definitely cool yeah well and and i will say that i think the some people assume that these these uh new signs were just created in 2020 or in response to 2020 um events in 2020 and and uh if you look at philadelphia's signs a lot of those were years and decades in the making and acknowledgement of the the history of slavery in Independence Park is a huge part of the conversation that's been going on in Philadelphia about this.

25:03So it's not, you know, recognizing not just that this is important for you as a person, but also for the wider community and the efforts that's gone in to recognize the history of slavery and the history of civil rights in the country, I think has been a very important part of this and something i don't think a lot of people reckon understand who aren't um engaged in it um every day so yeah the signage in parks is one of those things that like you don't notice or think about until you're really looking and you're really there reading and being thoughtful about what you're consuming for a lot of people i think you're there just to like see i don't know it's like the the um statue of liberty national monument is part of the park system um and there were so many there were like 440 signs from that just that monument which i thought was really interesting i don't know if it could not have been the only one person oh well so we did an event okay that explains that okay so you guys had an event there to promote yeah we we had um two volunteers from our two of our steering committee members who live in New York, um, took two different groups, one to Ellis Island.

26:23Um, Lena Bowman took them to Ellis Island and I forget where the, um, the other group went, but, uh, uh, Ellis, I think most of the people went to Ellis Island and, um, and then that's why independent independence park is the second most submissions because it's, it's been a big deal here and a lot of coverage in Philadelphia. Yeah. Okay. That explains that. I was like, God, this one guy at Ellis Island really racking it up trying to get high school hard um but i think that yeah it was a cool event it was cool to be able to take people there and and like we paid for the ferry to ride day to rescue project paid for the ferry ride um to for the people who decided to come and um but i think that's the thing somebody said to this to me early on it's not just about the rescues it's about the community we build through the rescues um and i think that's something to you know keep in mind yeah yeah I think that um you kind of touched on that Sam you said like I don't know if it was the goal I think it kind of was the goal like there's two goals here there's there's the preservation and there's the getting people involved getting people to think about history talk to each other all of that yeah for sure

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30:10Yeah, and just going through the signs that were captured is, it's so interesting because, I mean, I was just clicking signs like at random to write about this and else obviously so many of the so many of the signage is very it's not like it doesn't have a political agenda it's just saying exactly what was happening and what was happening was people were fleeing war and oppression and genocide and that's very relevant to today um and you know sites like the Frederick Douglass um historical site in DC um has uh the uh I think they probably have the full I just saw a couple of the signs quoting but the full um what to the slave is the fourth of July address um and that's just it's a beautiful piece of work that is so relevant to today um and it's just I like if if the administration was going to send out people to take down these signs that would be just I'm just imagining like ripping them all down it would you would have to take all of them down because how would you ever um i don't know it's like all of them were like subversive in their own way while being just completely straight no politics about it just this is what was happening at the time when people were thinking about and dealing with um so i thought it was really incredible to go through archive but we'll talk about the archive in a second i'm getting ahead of myself um were you rushed was this like a very like we need to get on this like immediately because i know a lot of archive projects especially in the digital world are like, this is going down tomorrow.

31:45Get a terabyte ready. Like, let's go. What was kind of the mood? Was it very urgent for you to get this launched? Yeah, I mean, we kind of talked about trying to capitalize on that 4th of July weekend. And that was the initial deadline of let's get this going. Let's get everything set up and ready to release. I think we officially launched on July 3rd. And yeah, I mean, all along, there's a sense of urgency because we don't know exactly what's at risk and we don't know exactly when it's at risk. Like you mentioned, Sam, there have been some signs that came down before and after the September 17th kind of initial deadline.

32:32And then there's no real understanding, at least I don't understand exactly when things are going to be done. So we don't know. Have they stopped? Have they finished taking down signs? Or is this going to continue? And we kind of have to keep our eyes open to know when it's happening. so all along there's a there's a bit of a sense of urgency to to try to collect as much as possible before it can be removed or changed and there's some sites that we still can't get to i mean that are either closed there's one site in particular i would love and in pennsylvania i'd love to go to but it's on a active military base and it's a former native american school so it's definitely one of those that would be fit within um kind of the the main things that we're looking for but um and and that's why we are continuing to accept photos and so if people are you know still going out to parks take pictures of everything that you see and like we've been saying all along like we don't know what is at risk we don't we don't have a shared definition of what negative means or what disparaging means.

33:51Yeah. And so we want pictures of everything and we still need pictures from a lot of places. And so we're still collecting photos. I'll give you a fun example. That's not, it's not in civil rights history. It's not within that angle, but I think it's an interesting one. The Guilford Courthouse, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse is a site in North Carolina that is, we, the revolutionary forces lost quite a bit. I mean, they lost many men. It was abjectly a loss, but they damaged the British forces so much that it changed the course of revolutionary history. And that site tells that story. But one of the questions I had when I went to it was like, would this be seen as disparaging?

34:39I mean, this is a negative view of the revolutionary army because it talks about the fact that the North Carolinians just kind of hightailed it and ran away from the battle. and other kinds of tales, you know, of mutiny in a sense. But it was a critical part of the revolutionary history. So the way the orders are written are so vague that even something that you would normally see as a part of military history could be interpreted as disparaging. of um so it's one of those examples where it's i you know we know what certain we know what they're what the likely candidates for removal and certainly those are the ones that we targeted but the way you can read this could be so much broader than yeah and i'm sure that's by design um yeah i'm sure that's um that's part of the playbook here um the white house is part of the national park system currently being taken apart um maybe we needed to get somebody out there to take some pictures um yeah god i have to laugh or laugh or we will cry um so you launched um was it immediately just like everybody was flooding submissions did they trickle in like what was the the reaction after you launched.