Save Our Signs: National Park Signs and the Power of Crowdsourcing to Combat Censorship

In spring 2025, Executive Order 14253, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," directed the interior secretary to "ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction," notably including the National Park Service (NPS), do not "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living." In response, we launched Save Our Signs, a crowdsourced research project intended to rescue such images from potential censorship and to raise awareness about this threat to cultural heritage. We invited the public to visit NPS sites, take photos of signs, and submit those photos to be published in an open-access archive. In this article, we explain the crucial role NPS plays in public history and cultural heritage and outline how the Trump administration targeted government information and cultural institutions for censorship throughout 2025. Next, we detail how we collaboratively developed the Save Our Signs project to combat this censorship. Finally, we discuss the unique power of crowdsourcing as a research methodology and explain why academic libraries are an ideal site for interdisciplinary research. The Save Our Signs Archive is currently home to more than ten thousand freely licensed photos, with plans for further releases and feature developments.