When Nadiri Saunders sees the wolves, they are black specks on the snow-covered mountains. Small but stark, like letters on a page. She catches this glimpse of them from miles away, through a scope lent to her by a wildlife biologist. 

But this isn’t her first encounter with the wolves. In the archives of Yellowstone National Park, Saunders has been exploring documents that date back to 1995, when wolves were reintroduced to the park in a groundbreaking restoration effort.

She is one of seven University of Michigan School of Information students who spent their spring break at the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center, processing archival records to make them accessible to the public. First offered in 1999, UMSI’s Alternative Spring Break program matches student teams with organizations across the nation, where they leverage their expertise to help solve information challenges.

“Students get hands-on experience, but more than that, they have the opportunity to get to know their host organizations and aid their missions,” says Angie Zill, community and innovation programs manager at UMSI. “It's a real opportunity to see how their information skills can create positive change in the world.” 

This year’s project in Yellowstone National Park was made possible by a grant from the National Park Service and led by C. Olivia Frost Collegiate Professor of Information Elizabeth Yakel, a distinguished archivist known for her work in advancing archival access. 

“U.S. national parks contain vast amounts of archival records of importance to historians, ecologists, geologists and the general public,” Yakel says. “But park archivists face tremendous backlogs in processing these records.” 

In what’s known as an “archives blitz,” the team of Master of Science in Information students undertook a concerted effort to arrange and describe an entire collection in five days. Their project focused on decades of administrative materials, largely from the Yellowstone Center for Resources. 

“That division of the park was started in the early ’90s, and their role is to gather data and analyze and manage the park's resources,” Saunders says. “That includes aquatic life, vegetation and wildlife, but also cultural resources. Their goal is to conserve the resources in the park and ensure that people can continue to enjoy it, without having too much of a negative impact on the environment itself.”

These records — maps, photographs, scientific data and administrative documents — help tell the story of the world’s first national park. They document Yellowstone’s natural and cultural resources, the evolution of its conservation policies, and major projects like the Yellowstone Wolf Project. 

“Looking through those materials was so amazing,” Saunders says. “You see the history of how much people care about preserving this unique ecosystem.”

For MSI student Sarah Lancaster, a conversation began to emerge between the materials she encountered during the day and her team’s interactions with the park in their free time: hiking, visiting Mammoth Hot Springs, and viewing wildlife through the binoculars provided in each of their hotel rooms. 

Alternative Spring Break in Yellowstone National Park

Student leader Sarah Lancaster (MSI '25) at Calcite Springs Overlook in Yellowstone National Park. (Photos by Nadiri Saunders)

From left to right at Mammoth Hot Springs: Theresa Azemar (MSI '26), Jordan Rhym (MSI '25), Diana Baxter (MSI '26), Sarah Lancaster (MSI '26), Annika Dekker (MSI '25), Madison Haack (MSI '25) and professor Elizabeth Yakel.

Students roast marshmallows at their hotel in Gardiner, MT. From left to right: Jordan Rhym (MSI '25), Annika Dekker (MSI '25) and Theresa Azemar (MSI '26).

Viewing a herd of bison through binoculars. From left to right: Jordan Rhym (MSI '25), Madison Haack (MSI '25) and Theresa Azemar (MSI '26).

“We could connect our experiences in the park to what we were seeing in the archives every day,” she says.

Yellowstone, which thrums with traffic and the chatter of visitors during its busy season, is hushed and otherworldly in March. This is still very much winter in Montana, with temperatures dipping below zero some nights. Wildlife linger at a lower elevation for warmth, spending more time in meadows and valleys. Instead of long lines of cars, you can see bison coiling through the park.

What struck Saunders about Yellowstone was its expansiveness. Wherever she looked, a new detail presented itself: a sunburst behind the Beartooth Mountains, a stand of lodgepole pines, wildlife tracks preserved in the snow. 

Saunders learns best when she is immersed. She worked in public libraries for seven years before starting graduate school at UMSI last fall. While many of her colleagues earned their master’s degrees in library science through online programs, she knew she wanted to be part of an in-person community.

“I just love when living and learning are merged,” she says. 

Alternative Spring Break took that experience to a new level. 

“The MSI program has an emphasis on peer-to-peer learning,” she says. “But being able to go on this trip and spend time with each other in the car, sharing meals and hiking together, that kind of learning happened continuously. It felt like we were able to go deeper into understanding one another and the different perspectives we were bringing to this experience.” 

From the beginning, Yakel made it clear to the students that she wasn’t on the trip as their authority — she was there alongside them, experiencing this collection for the first time. 

“That helped empower us to be archivists, rather than just students on a trip,” Saunders says. 

Over the course of the week, Saunders found herself becoming more comfortable with ambiguity. “There isn’t necessarily a correct answer,” she says. “Instead, it’s up to you to take the initiative to observe and analyze and then express how you think you can be helpful.” 

Yakel, who earned her own master’s degree and PhD in library and information studies from UMSI, watched with admiration as the students collaborated to tackle complex parts of the collection and work through thorny decisions. 

"The students rock,” she says. “I was impressed by their teamwork and initiative. They embraced the challenge.”

By the end of the week, their work amounted to 80 boxes of processed records, which is no small feat. But its significance goes beyond what can be measured. 

“All of these records are finally going to be available to researchers, which is huge, because some of them are from the ’80s and ’90s,” Lancaster says. “That's a lot of years where they have been inaccessible.”

For Saunders, the impact of this project comes down to a future moment. “As an archivist, you hope that there will be a time when someone is looking for something very specific,” she says. “And the effort that you put in will help them access that knowledge with as much ease as possible.” 

This is the same impulse that led to the creation of the national parks: to protect something important. To make it available to anyone, now and in years to come.

As they walked together to get lunch one day, Yakel noticed Saunders pausing to take photos of a fallen tree, scattered scrubs emerging from the snow, wispy clouds above a stretch of mountains. This attention to detail isn’t unlike the work of an archivist.
 
“She turned to me and said, ‘It never gets old, does it?’” Saunders recalls. “And I was like, ‘No, you can just keep looking at the same mountains every day. And there's always something new to observe.’”

This project was made possible in part by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Grant Number: F074205, 2024-2025. 

LEARN MORE

Organizations from all industries and sectors are invited to propose information-based projects for students to work on through client-based courses and programs like Alternative Spring Break. Host a student project.