Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian is a “Crowd to Cloud” effort to steward and safeguard our institution by preserving the Smithsonian Institution’s contents as they exist in 2025.  With our feet and with our cellphone cameras, Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian is demonstrating how much the Smithsonian means to us and how seriously we take the responsibility to defend it.

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Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian are ordinary people from all walks of life who love the Smithsonian Institution and view it as the shared treasure of all of us now and for future generations. The current Administration's call for a review of "wall didactics, placards and gallery labels currently on display" to ensure that they align with the President’s ill-informed and partisan impulses represents an illegitimate over-reach of executive power that threatens the independence and authority of the Smithsonian Institution and endangers our national treasure. Established by Congress in 1864, the Smithsonian is governed by a Board of Regents, Secretary, and professional staff and is not an executive agency. The rich and varied array of its contents, meticulously curated by the highly qualified, well-regarded, and consummately professional staff of the Smithsonian, do not belong to any one person, any one administration, or even any one generation.

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In response to President Trump’s August 12, 2025 letter to Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, and inspired by the Save Our Signs initiative launched by the Data Rescue Project, Jim Millward and Chandra Manning began talking about how to bring people together to defend the Smithsonian. They quickly decided to launch a communal effort to document the Smithsonian’s contents with low barriers to entry so that anyone who wanted to participate could do so. They allied with Jessica Dickinson Goodman, who had the expertise to build the storage infrastructure. On August 21, Jim Millward sent an email message to a few local people to gauge interest in a crowd-sourced documentation project.

 

The response was overwhelming.

 

Not only did people who received the initial message respond; they forwarded the message to others who they thought might be interested and soon more than six hundred volunteers had stepped up to help document the Smithsonian’s exhibits and signage. Within three weeks, more than 17,500 photographs had been uploaded to the project, with thousands more photographs still en route from volunteers’ phones to the database being created on the fly. Dickinson Goodman, Manning, and Millward continue to work together to co-ordinate and communicate with volunteers, organize the photographs, and plan next phases of the project, which include additional ways of allowing Citizen Historians to document how much the Smithsonian means to them and making our new Crowd to Cloud archive widely accessible.  

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If you want to help, email us at info@citizenhistorians.org

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Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian

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20 September 2025