About 95 percent of Avery Library's more than two million archival items were acquired under Parks's tenure, up from 50,000 items when she began. Working with architects, firms, and family donors, Parks selected collections for Avery that shape an archive with research and preservation impact. 

Her most memorable and challenging acquisition feat was moving the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archive 3,000 miles from Arizona to New York. Between 2013 and 2016 Parks spent a total of six weeks in Arizona packing the archive, which filled the equivalent of six tractor trailers. Soon after the collection made it to Avery, inquiries from around the world began to pour in, connecting the Library staff to, in Parks's words, "an immediate fan club that wants to write to you every day." In 2017 she was awarded a Wright Spirit Award by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy for her role in moving the collection to Columbia. She was also a guest curator of  Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that ran through October 2017. 

Throughout the years the archive's mission has been to develop a complete cross section of the world of architecture and a comprehensive record of the architectural process, one which would have, in the words of Talbot Hamlin, Avery Librarian in the 1930s-40s, "a permanence that actual buildings do not always achieve." As Parks observed, "That is so true in any place, but in New York especially."