Data Librarians are Securing Government Data!

A small team of data librarians has been actively searching for data assumed at risk and sending the datasets and documentation to ICPSR's DataLumos, a crowd-sourced repository for government data. In the past week, they have sent data from IMLS, the Department of Education, FEMA, HUD, SAMSHA, and more. In addition, they have been nominating sites for the End of Term Crawl. They aim to ensure that the data captured has the appropriate documentation and metadata to enable long-term discoverability and preservation.

The Data Rescue Project (DRP) is a coalition of data librarian organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. they aim to coordinate and communicate efforts to preserve access to public US government data that is currently at risk. They have also been active in data gathering, curation and cleaning, cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets. 

For the project and website launch, they have compiled an overview of ongoing efforts and helpful resources:

- Current efforts

- Resources

They recognize many people are confused about where to go and what is happening. These librarians call on individuals in the community to contact them if they are working on data rescues. To help with coordination across data rescue efforts, they have created the Data Rescue Tracker. This tool can be used both to look up where data has been rescued and to nominate your efforts. 

DRP’s Data Rescue Tracker is a collaborative tool built to catalog all existing public data rescue efforts. The Data Rescue Tracker provides consolidated overviews of who is downloading which dataset from which government websites. 

• If you are looking for a specific dataset, check out Downloads to see if it has been captured. 

•  If you are looking for ongoing initiatives and what they’re focusing on, check out Maintainers.

• Do you know of dataset downloads or maintainers that are missing from the Data Rescue Tracker? Use their Dataset Download Submission Form to let them know. Experienced data professionals will review your submission before publication in the Data Rescue Tracker.**

You can subscribe to receive updates from the DRP. Look over the FAQ page to learn more about volunteering. There is a google form for those who want to contribute more time and effort.

The Data Rescue Project recognizes the tremendous interest and energy around saving our public data heritage. They applaud the outpouring of concern and the offers of assistance. Our goal is to bridge divides across professions and people who depend on this data. Those include not just librarians but also academics, local service providers, and more. Public data is our data. It is part of our national heritage and should be preserved long-term.