Google Partners With National Park Service To Bring Imagery From 40 Parks To Street View

The National Park Service is celebrating its one-hundredth birthday later this year and as a part of its celebration, the agency has teamed up with Google to bring more of its parks into Google Street View and digitize many of the artifacts in its vast collections.

Google is launching Street View imagery for 40 national parks today, including Alcatraz, Santa Cruz Channel Island and Montezuma Castle National Monument. The Google Cultural Institute also worked with the Park Service to create a digital collection with 3,800 objects from over 350 national park sites online.

The Institute‘s site now features a new collection that highlights the homes of Abraham Lincoln, Harry S Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dwight David Eisenhower, for example. Many of these combine Street View with scans and photographs of the home’s other collections so you can take a virtual stroll through these houses.

You can also now find an exhibit from the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site on the Cultural Institute’s website, as well as objects from numerous other sites managed by the National Park Service.

“This marriage of technology and history means that anyone, anywhere can see artifacts and sites that, provide a taste of the rich and diverse story of America,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in today’s announcement. “Our hope is that this partnership will not only illustrate and elevate our nation’s history and culture, but inspire more people to visit the wonderfully diverse places that the National Park Service protects and preserves for current and future generations.”