National Park Archives: Why Are They Important?

By Dan Cone

Project Archivist, National Park Service in Atlanta

Regular readers know that the staff at Canaveral National Seashore work hard (with the help of volunteers!) to preserve and protect the seashore, but what happens to their original hand-written notes about sea turtle sightings, photos of cleanup projects, or reports about renovations on the Eldora State House? 

All of these are National Park Service (NPS) records and by law, some of them are “mission critical records,” meant to be preserved in perpetuity. The most important are “Resource Management Records,” which not only show how the park is currently managing its resources, but also help park staff take care of them far into the future.

Like many other national parks, Canaveral’s staff is often kept so busy that they barely have time for anything more than placing the park’s records in folders within many different boxes, desks and file cabinets. As a result, sometimes it can be hard to find the records again when they need them!

Thankfully, the Museums & Archives branch of the Southeast Regional Office (SERO) in Atlanta, Ga., has stepped in to help. With special federal funding, the branch regularly sends archivists -- specialists trained to find, assess and take care of such records -- to regional parks in order to locate all their records, determine which ones are Resource Management Records (known as RMRs), and take steps to preserve them as an archival collection.

Earlier this year, SERO archivists completed a records survey at Canaveral and took a cargo van full of records back to Atlanta to work on. Carefully examining the contents of each folder, they used federal records guidelines to separate the RMRs from the other mission critical records, as well as temporary records and duplicates. The archivists then organized the RMRs to show which park office created them (such as the superintendent, the law enforcement division, or the interpretation division), arranged them in the best order (usually alphabetically by folder title), placed them in brand new, labeled, acid-free folders and boxes, and wrote a “finding aid” so anyone searching the collection will know where to look. For example, if staff wanted to find out how many sea turtle nests were recorded at Apollo Beach in 2020, they would look in Folder 1, Box 22.

After completing this RMR collection, the archivists brought it back to Canaveral during the first week of November. They placed the collection in the climate-controlled Curatorial Storage building in Titusville, looked through some of the large documents (such as maps and charts) in the map cases, identified which ones were RMRs, added those to the collection in labeled folders, and provided a physical summary of where everything is located in the storage room. SERO is confident that this organized records collection will make it easier for the park staff to take care of Canaveral’s natural and historical treasures for many years to come.