A number of gardens and museums provide “family” level memberships which come with a reciprocal membership benefit that provides access to a set of other garden/museum institutions. RAP, ROAM, and NARM are three such reciprocal membership programs. I was a bit frustrated by the tooling/materials provided for seeing the qualifying institutions. The respective program websites provide some basic state level filtering and pdf files listing all the places. I don’t like pdfs. I wanted to see all of the qualifying places on one map.
So, I wrote a couple python scripts to scrape the pdfs, parse, and format them as csv to import in google maps. I’m glad to have found the pdftotext Linux command. It made that part easy. I did a quick check of the results and places look mostly correct. Hope this can help some folks plan their visits and discover the reciprocal membership institutions. Links and the shared map below.
2022/2021 map of all the RAP, ROAM, and NARM reciprocal membership gardens/museums.
American Horticultural Society Reciprocal Admissions Program (RAP) gardens
Reciprocal Organization of Associated Museums (ROAM)
North American Reciprocal Museum (NARM) Association
Patrick Lundquist 