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Moreover, the reticence some survey respondents express ignores many possible uses of technology besides on-site interpretation. The NPS holds vast archives and libraries of primary sources and, as we have noted elsewhere, often very useful research reports and studies (“gray literature”) pertaining to the parks’ and agencies’ histories as well as to the histories they interpret. Voluminous amounts of this material are digitized already. Yet as several respondents remark and our own experiences confirm, these archives—even the digital ones—are often inaccessible to the public, difficult for scholars to find, and at times underused even by park staff. Yet these archival resources are themselves part of the resources of the past that NPS holds. The digital revolution expands the potential availability of that material to audiences beyond professional researchers, and thus blurs the line between interpretation and research by offering visitors, students, and professional researchers alike self-directed experiences exploring parks’ historical materials. A beneficial by-product of making these materials more easily available on the web will be to foster and encourage professional historical research on and in the parks. This potential is not presently being fully utilized, however. Part of the problem has to do with the fragmentation and seemingly haphazard organization of existing digital resources. As one respondent comments, “there is no national leadership for web presence in the NPS that combines access to collections, archives, photographs, historical research, etc. NPSFOCUS and the WebCatalog in Washington and eTIC in Denver do not know how to communicate and often work at cross purposes.”136 Indeed, we are aware of several national repositories of NPS archival material that could (and do) support development of dissertations, books, interpretive exhibits, and other historical scholarship about the parks. Yet this material is complicated to locate and search—even for experienced NPS researchers—and not always readily accessible to non-NPS scholars. For the NPS to be a serious player in the work of historical researchers nationwide, collections must be made more easily and centrally available in digital form. Providing access to research within the NPS is an area where the chief historian’s office at WASO has been a leader for years. The NPS “History E-Library” website is probably the closest thing to a “portal” for anyone researching park history.137 The database contains vast numbers of digitized historical reports and documents, and is largely searchable (although because it comprises largely PDFs and flat HTML pages, not in quite the same way a conventional database-driven library catalog is). It also provides centralized links to other key NPS databases, including the IRMA Portal, NPS Focus, and the NPS Library. But the page is often difficult to find unless one knows to look for it and, oddly, is not one of the links featured from the main NPS history website accessible from the main nps.gov page under the tab “Discover History,” nor is it found under the subpage of NPS history featuring “Collections,” which does link to other NPS repositories.138 Meanwhile, another vast and valuable repository of digitized agency historical materials is available through the eTIC, the electronic Technical Information Center at the NPS’s Denver Service Center, said to be a “central repository for NPS planning, design, and construction drawings and related documents.”139 However, this database is presently available only to NPS employees. Links to other related collections—for example, the Historic American Building Survey/Historic American Engineering Records collections at the Library of Congress; NPS Historic Photograph Collection (with around two thousand historic images
136 Respondent 10999. 137 NPS, “History E-Library,” http://www.nps.gov/history/history. 138 NPS, “Discover History,” http://www.nps.gov/history/ ); and Collections, http://www.nps.gov/ history/collections.htm. 139 NPS, Denver Service Center, http://www.nps.gov/dsc/a_who/a_8_TIC%20info.htm.