Introduction
The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) was signed into law in 1966, during a period of reckoning about the loss of historic buildings in the United States in the years after World War II. The research of a Special Committee on Historic Preservation resulted in the publication of the report titled With a Heritage so Rich, which offered a set of recommendations “that addressed federal, state, local, and international means of improving historic preservation.” Key outcomes of the NHPA were the creation of National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) which is administered by the National Park Service (NPS), and the formation of State Historic Preservation Officers and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs and THPOs), among other preservation programs still in effect to this day.1
In the article Taming Technology for Preservation, John I. Mesick anticipated in 1976 that a new technology, database management systems, would aid in the automation of storage and retrieval of historic property inventories such as the National Register. Mesick concluded the article by saying that nearly all the recommendations set forth in the With Heritage So Rich had been acted upon, and in doing so, “we have throttled many of our impulses to waste and destroy. But beyond this achievement, a further task remains. Our nation must now allocate the resources and train the personnel who will ultimately tame our technology to accomplish the purposes of historic preservation in America.”2
This terminal project considers the relevance and use of technology in the field of preservation, specifically as it relates to managing data about the National Register of Historic Places. Data management has many implications for researchers and users of the National Register, as explored by the chapter by Carol D. Shull titled ‘Searching for Women in the National Register of Historic Places’ in the book Restoring Women's History through Historic Preservation (2003). Shull described that a decision was made in the early 1980s not to include a specific data field related to women’s history in the system used to track all of the listings on the National Register, and dedicates the chapter to describing different ways of locating information about this topic, such as by browsing the ‘significant persons’ data field for the names of women or querying the database for names of architects (90 out of the 25,000 names were found to be women). In this chapter, the National Register was portrayed as a useful research tool that contains information about important aspects of women’s history.
The almost 100,000 properties listed on the National Register to date represent roughly 1.8 million resources, which are defined as buildings, sites, structures, and objects. The nomination forms with research and photos about these properties are submitted to the NPS prior to listing on the National Register are an accumulation of knowledge spanning almost six decades. In his essay titled To Expand and Maintain a National Register of Historic Places, John H. Sprinkle Jr., who served as a historian for the National Park Service for over three decades, describes the National Register as a “1.5-million page history textbook that illustrates the kinds of places that more than two generations of Americans have thought worthy of preservation.” Sprinkle’s concept of the National Register is echoed by the National Park Service’s description of the various stakeholders that find value in being able to access the National Register, specifically in a digital context. “These important records of American history contain a wealth of information on the diverse places and people of this country and are now accessible to all Americans – communities, researchers, planners, educators, and students.”3 4 5
Despite the importance of these records, the current technology infrastructure that allows users to access National Register data has considerable limitations. Nominations from the beginnings of the National Register through 2012 have been largely digitized (about 91%) and are available through the National Archives online catalog. However, only about 4.4% nominations from the years 2014-2023 are available on the National Archives website. This means users must resort to accessing nomination forms through the respective SHPO, but not all SHPOs have websites which make their state’s National Register nominations accessible to the public.6
Almost 50 years after the novelty of database management systems, discussions about access to digital resources are now framed in larger contexts of ‘open data’, a term that encompasses topics beyond just software or technology, but of ethics, principles and policies about data as well. The term gained prominent recognition at a national level in 2009 with the launch of the data.gov website, and in 2013 with Obama’s executive order titled Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information. This order explicitly alluded to ‘openness’ as one of its guiding principles. The Open Knowledge Foundation’s definition,“open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose,” is widely accepted and often quoted by government data portals and academic institutions.
The goal of this terminal project is to consider ways in which the data management approach of the National Register can be modernized by and for various stakeholder groups. The primary question that will guide the research is: How can an open data framework inform the way National Register nominations are published and accessed as an institutional collection?
This research question can be broken up into several parts:
- how can an open data framework inform: A literature review will introduce the concept of an open data framework and explore the ways that it is relevant to data management in the context of cultural heritage. This literature review will situate the National Register alongside other cultural resource fields that have demonstrated rigorous scholarship, debate and practice around the issue of open data frameworks. This terminal project will explore case studies which demonstrate a specific focus on open data approaches in order to inform recommendations about improving access to the National Register.
- the way National Register nominations are published and accessed: The technologies and interfaces that a stakeholder uses to find specific National Register nomination forms or information about aggregate lists of National Register nominations. A survey will be conducted and will ask stakeholders to describe their experiences and observations about accessing the National Register.
- institutional collection: This research will first look at how the National Register can be conceptualized as a body of knowledge, and how this institutional collection is an important source of research for preservationists.
Alongside Sprinkle’s essay in the book Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, other contributors were asked to reflect on, among other things, “What’s working, what’s not, and where can we do better?” in the field of preservation7. This terminal project explores similar questions, specifically of the technology used to access this ‘1.5-million page history textbook.’
About a decade after the passage of the NHPA, the NPS began publishing a newsletter titled CRM Bulletin (later versions were branded as “A Technical Bulletin for Parks, Federal Agencies, States, Local Governments, and the Private Sector”). In its inaugural issue, NPS employee F. Ross Holland, Jr. wrote an article titled What We’re About and opened with the following: “As preservationists, we are living in exciting times, because we are on the ground floor of an emerging discipline and a rapidly evolving philosophy.” Recognizing the rapidly changing understanding of best-practices, the newsletter would become one way for preservationists to exchange ideas and keep “abreast of changing philosophy, techniques, and technology.” The CRM Bulletin invited information sharing from beyond just members of the NPS Cultural Resource Management Division. “Perhaps your article will be critical of the way the National Park Service goes about its work. Such criticism is acceptable…,” and as such, this essay will respond to this 46 year old invitation and will offer a constructive critical look at data management of the National Register.8
The value of and ability to analyze the National Register’s data was explored by graduate student Charles Laney Rollins in 1974 in the paper titled Analysis of the National Register and of the problems concerning accuracy of the data used in the analysis. “A capacity to produce a critical analysis of the current contents of the National Register is vitally important in order to provide essential data for an appraisal of the overall effectiveness of the Register.” Rollins accessed early collections of National Register nominations in order to understand the overall makeup of many aspects of the collection, and did so by using punch cards to analyze 4,838 properties of the roughly 6,000 that had been listed up until that point. By describing the process of accessing and analyzing the data, Rollins was able to not just assess the contents of the National Register by specific data fields (such as ownership type, listing date, or acreage of the listed property), but also observe issues with the data collection, storage and processing strategies employed by SHPOs and the NPS at the time. These detailed observations allowed Rollins to develop further recommendations for improving these processes.
The critical lenses used by present day preservation professionals to understand the National Register are explored in the next section of this terminal project. The discussion paints the National Register as a cohesive collection, the sum of which is larger than its parts. This collection reflects current and past preservation values and practices, and not just a list of individual nomination forms or the buildings they represent. Access to this collection by researchers enables thorough and meaningful analysis of the National Register.9
1Kimball M. Banks and Ann M. Scott, The National Historic Preservation Act : Past, Present, and Future (New York ; Routledge, 2016).
2John I. Mesick, “Taming Technology for Preservation,” Momentum (ICOMOS Journal) 13 (1976): 93–106.
3“John Sprinkle, Jr | School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation,” accessed April 22, 2024, https://arch.umd.edu/people/john-sprinkle-jr.
4Max Page and Marla R. Miller, eds., Bending the Future : Fifty Ideas for the next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, Bending the Future : 50 Ideas for the next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 232.
5“A Preservation Partnership: Digitizing the National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmark Records (U.S. National Park Service),” accessed August 22, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/articles/nr_digitization.htm.
6See Appendix A: ‘National Archives link calculation’ for further details.
7Page and Miller, Bending the Future : Fifty Ideas for the next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, 3.
8“CRM Bulletin Vol. 1 No. 1” (National Park Service, February 1978).
9Charles Laney Rollins, “Analysis of the National Register and of the Problems Concerning Accuracy of the Data Used in the Analysis.” (North Carolina State University, 1974), https://catalog.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/NCSU502984.