The National Park Electronic Library we told you about last fall has, and is, expanding to provide more reference materials from the U.S., and soon Canadian, park services.
Overseeing the site is Dr. Harry A. Butowsky, a retired National Park Service Historian and former manager of the invaluable NPS History e-Library Web Site. He's assisted by Randall D. Payne, who "has been a volunteer for the National Park Service for over 30 years and lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has contributed thousands of electronic documents to the National Park Service."
When the site was launched, Dr. Butowsky said "NPShistory.com continues the legacy of the NPS History e-Library and is devoted to those individuals who are passionate about our National Parks and want to learn more about the history, mission and historical archives of the National Park Service. Our National Parks present an American history textbook — a textbook that educates us about the people, events, buildings, objects, landscapes, and artifacts of the American past and about the aspirations and actions that produced those tangible survivors. NPShistory.com is intended to represent all aspects of this history."
The latest update to the site is the addition of six new park studies, 20 new national and international park brochures, and a new feature called "Park Rack Cards," with 37 entries. The site's book of the month is Museums, Monuments and National Parks by Denise Meringolo, while the person of the month is Cheryl Brown Henderson because of her work as President of the Brown Foundation to establish Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site. May 17, 2014 is the 60th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision by the Supreme Court.
The site also has been updated with two new search engines at the bottom of the page to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, which, when combined with previous entries, gives visitors to the National Park Electronic Library the ability to access about 20,000 NPS studies on the web.
Coming later this month will be a Canadian companion website, the National Parks of Canada Electronic Library.