Archiving 40 Years of National Park Service Paleontology Records

Emma Squire, Molly Williams and Nancy Russell with the first boxes of NPS Paleontology Program records. National Park Service photo.

Where the records came from

Vincent Santucci, the National Park Service's senior paleontologist, remembers a speaker at the first Federal Paleontology Conference proudly announcing that 12 parks had fossil resources. The remark accidentally revealed how little park staff knew about their own fossils. Santucci began contacting parks and colleagues, reviewing the literature and visiting other repositories to learn how many park sites really held fossils, gathering supporters as he went. Forty years on, the result is the NPS Paleontology Program Records.

The collection documents the Park Service's fossil resources for management, research and education. It holds park-by-park files, servicewide records, correspondence, publications, Geologic Resources Inventory and Inventory and Monitoring reports, photographs and negatives, maps, oral histories, and records of the Junior Ranger and National Fossil Day programs, both on paper and born digital. The NPS History Collection also keeps National Fossil Day giveaways — pins, patches, coins and more. In 2023 Santucci started a project to have the whole collection formally archived with the NPS History Collection at Harpers Ferry Center.

National Fossil Day giveaways like those in the NPS History Collection. National Park Service photo.

What an archive is

An archive is a repository that keeps collections in a controlled environment so the public can use them now and in the future. Archives hold far more than documents: photographs, film and magnetic media, maps, plans and drawings, and more and more digital records. Archivists sort them into analog materials, such as paper and prints, and born-digital ones, such as word-processing files, emails and spreadsheets. Saving a copy of your data — "archiving" it in everyday speech — is not the same thing.

The first six boxes of archived NPS Paleontology Program records to be processed and receive their official box labels.

The team

Santucci and NPS History Collection archivist Nancy Russell designed the project a couple of years ago, and $35,000 from the Park Service's Geological Resources Division paid for it. They oversee the work; the hands-on processing has been done by preservation interns Emma Squire and Molly Williams, with paleontologist Justin Tweet of the Paleontology Program advising and bringing the view of someone who will use the collection.

Processing

Squire and Williams started in September 2023. The first step with any collection is to survey it — what kinds of materials it holds, how they are organized, and where they came from — and then write a processing plan dividing it into series and subseries. Here, the archivists could keep asking the collection's creators questions throughout.

Processing means arranging, rehousing and describing a collection:

• papers go into new acid-free, lignin-free folders and boxes, and metal fasteners — binder clips, rusting staples, paper clips — come out;
• items needing conservation, such as those with tape, glue, tears or other damage, are flagged;
• oversized maps and drawings go to flat files, and cellulose acetate film, color prints and negatives to cold storage, with separation sheets recording where each came from;
• unnecessary duplicates are removed;
• a container list records each folder's title and dates, box by box.

The paper collection now measures 55 linear feet — a measure of shelf space — not counting tens of thousands of born-digital files still to come. Some items, such as a USGS map or a conference program, may exist elsewhere, but their place in this collection is what gives them meaning for park management.

A processed box of Fossil Butte records, with a photograph sleeved and flagged for cold storage. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Scanning

Archivists do not usually scan as they process, but this project did, so paleontology staff can keep using the park files. Santucci scanned some and the interns finished the rest on two scanners: nearly 5,700 records, which join more than 190,000 files in the program's digital archive. The files are then organized and renamed in bulk to a naming scheme worked out with Santucci and Tweet, meeting archival standards while staying usable day to day; Russell calls file naming more art than science. The scans also go to the National Archives and Records Administration as the record copy, and the goal is to rename all the born-digital files, including those on the program's server, the same way.

Finds in the boxes

• The first letters to parks asking whether they had fossils. Many parks answered that they knew little or nothing, but the question sent them digging in their own archives, and the excitement grows through the files as park after park is confirmed.
• Oral histories with paleontologists, park staff, scientists and professors, which let the archivists hear people they otherwise knew only as names on papers.
• Education materials, from the Junior Paleontologist Program and National Fossil Day to a coloring book — including entries from 1985 and 1986 in a Badlands titanothere coloring contest, mailed in by children across the country.
• Favorite sites: Squire's is the pygmy mammoths of Channel Islands National Park, a case study in island adaptation, including a nearly complete skeleton found on Santa Rosa Island in 1994. Williams's is Carlsbad Caverns National Park, with finds such as the musk ox in Musk Ox Cave; the records also hold testimony behind the Lechuguilla Protection Act of 1993, which bars drilling and mining that could harm the cave.

Emma Squire and Molly Williams with a shelf of processed records. Image from the National Park Service's page.

When the work is finished, the collection's finding aid will be posted with the other NPS History Collection finding aids.

Sources

• National Park Service, Park Paleontology News 16(1), Spring 2024: "Preserving the NPS Fossil Record: The NPS Paleontology Program Archiving Project," by Molly Williams and Emma Squire. The article names the interns' program both as the National Council and the National Center for Preservation Education, so neither name is given here. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.