Join the Save Our Signs (SOS) team—a constellation of librarians, public historians and data experts based out of the University of Minnesota Libraries—for a presentation and discussion event on Thursday, January 29 from 1 – 3 pm in the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, room 310 in Pillsbury Hall or online via zoom. Register today.

We will explore how to connect institutional resources to people power in order to protect endangered cultural resources.

Save Our Signs is a crowdsourced research project launched in response to the Trump administration issuing “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that targets educational resources found in National Parks Service (NPS) sites across the country and directs NPS staff and visitors to report signs and exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

The NPS serves as the country’s largest outdoor history classroom. Each congressionally mandated site provides a robust and multi-faceted history of the United States. SOS invite members of the public to visit NPS sites, engage with history, and take photos of interpretive signs to be preserved in a public archive. As of today, this archive is home to over 10,000 photos of NPS signs from across the country, documenting stories ranging from the Stonewall Uprising in New York City to the incarceration of Japanese Americans at Manzanar in California.

In this presentation, we’ll tell the story of how the team behind Save Our Signs decided to meet the moment. We will share what we’ve learned about how the resources of a research university can be leveraged to mobilize people to create new knowledge. We’ll use this space to explore how university researchers can pursue collaborative, co-creative research that has the power to protect endangered cultural resources and advance social justice. By bringing people into the research process, we are co-creating new knowledge and offering opportunities for agency and action during times of social crisis.

This is a hybrid event (in-person and online) and will not be recorded. Snacks and drinks will be provided for in-person attendees. As always, this event is free and open to the public. Please email liberalartshub@umn.edu with any inquiries!