Most professional disciplines dealing with cultural resources focus on particular resource types. Historical architects and landscape architects exist to understand and treat historic structures and cultural landscapes.
Curators acquire and manage museum objects and collections.
Archeologists derive meaning from sites containing remnants of structures, objects, and other traces of human activity. Ethnographers are concerned with places and features significant to groups traditionally associated with them. During the preparation of the last release of NPS-28, some NPS historians complained that they were being slighted. The chapters were not for the disciplines, they were told, but for the management of the particular resources that fall within the disciplines' purview. There is no discrete class of resources for historians because history is not a resource-based discipline.