Archive note: This 2011 guest case study was written by Giles Parker, then a Museum Curator with the National Park Service Northeast Museum Services Center. I’ve preserved the substance of his account while restructuring it around the institutional problem the team was trying to solve.

The Northeast Museum Services Center was a behind-the-scenes National Park Service program supporting parks with curatorial work, archives, archaeology, conservation, collections planning and technical assistance. Parker’s central problem was visibility: many members of the public did not realize the National Park Service held museum collections at all, and even some NPS staff did not fully understand what the Center did.

Was social media worth scarce staff time?

Inside the office, social media initially looked like a questionable use of limited capacity. The Center had lost two full-time staff members without being able to refill the positions while its workload kept growing. Staff ranged from younger interns and volunteers comfortable with new platforms to colleagues who wondered whether Facebook and Twitter were essentially recreational distractions. The question was not whether social media existed; it was whether a small specialist unit could justify making it part of the work.

Parker identified three reasons to try. First, the scale and diversity of NPS collections were poorly understood. Second, the Center itself was nearly invisible despite supporting dozens of parks. Third, museum professionals were increasingly exchanging news, jobs, research and practice through social channels—meaning that staying out of those spaces was becoming a form of professional isolation.

A deliberately small rollout

After NPS social-media restrictions eased in late 2010, the Center tested a modest mix: two Twitter feeds, a Facebook page and a blog focused on archaeological collections management. Museum Specialist Megan Lentz served as the de facto social-media strategist, reviewing other museum practices and helping shape both short- and longer-term approaches.

The content strategy was practical rather than promotional. Staff redistributed museum and preservation job announcements, tracked issues such as storage, security and fire prevention, used park anniversaries and historic dates to surface collection material, connected with peer institutions, highlighted volunteers and interns, and wrote about the curation work that happens after excavation. Hootsuite was used to schedule and space posts across accounts.

The archaeology blog is especially telling. Instead of treating social media as a publicity stream, posts used individual objects—bottles, matches, pipe stems—to explain the research and collections-care work that visitors rarely see.

Early evidence

Within roughly six months, Parker reported more than 190 followers on the main NMSC Twitter account, more than 80 on the volunteer account, more than 70 Facebook followers, and roughly 300 readers per archaeology-blog post. Individual social posts often generated another 10–30 clicks. Those numbers were modest by mass-media standards, but meaningful for a specialist office whose normal service area was 76 park sites and whose problem was that many people did not know the unit existed.

Parker also described benefits that were harder to count: reconnecting with museum professionals outside the NPS, finding information about collections technology and risk management, strengthening workforce outreach and making collections stewardship more visible within the agency’s wider priorities.

What remains

The durable lesson is not that every specialist unit needed Twitter. It is that invisible expertise creates an institutional problem. If curators, archivists, conservators and archaeologists cannot make the work legible to colleagues, leaders, future professionals and the public, the organization has a harder time understanding why that capacity matters.

In that sense, social media was functioning as an early knowledge-visibility layer. It connected otherwise hidden collections work to workforce development, professional exchange, public stewardship and the broader National Park Service mission. The platforms changed. The need to make specialist knowledge visible did not.