Approaches, Rationales, and Challenges to Maintaining Site Inventory in the National Parks

Summary

For over a century, the National Park Service (NPS) has worked to preserve natural and cultural resources in more than four hundred park units for future generations. In addition, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires all federal agencies to maintain inventories of their historic properties. For decades, the NPS has relied upon three inventory systems: The List of Classified Structures, the Cultural Landscapes Inventory (CLI), and the Archeological Sites Management Information System (ASMIS). These systems began decades ago as paper files and continue today as electronic databases accessed via the internet.

The inventories allow NPS to maintain and update critical information including resource type, location, condition, threats, and disturbances. As the relevant technologies continue to develop with what seems like increasing rapidity, even these relatively modern databases are being rapidly rendered obsolete. The NPS Cultural Resources, Science, and Partnerships directorate has begun work to modernize these systems, and to facilitate their further integration with GIS technologies and other NPS programs, and incorporate elements of the now defunct Ethnographic Resources Inventory (ERI). This paper discusses the issues faced as NPS updates these crucial tools for a second century of service.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20382