By Bobray Bordelon | February 20, 2025
IASSIST members work to discover, curate, make available, and keep data available. At the beginning of February, IASSIST Secretary Lynda Kellam started an internal Google document for her university to keep track of USA federal data that was disappearing and data rescue efforts. While many were concerned and downloading data individually, efforts were often being duplicated while other data was disappearing and at risk of being lost.
IASSIST members were inquiring as were members of sister organizations including RDAP and the Data Curation Network. Lynda shared the document and soon others were adding to it. A meeting was called among various data organizations and leaders in past data rescue efforts to coordinate and soon the Data Rescue Project (DRP) was born. Other organizations and individuals have joined the effort.
DRP aims to coordinate and communicate efforts to preserve access to public USA federal data that is currently at risk, and gather, curate and clean, catalog, and provide sustained access and distribution of data assets. They aim to ensure that the data captured has the appropriate documentation and metadata to enable long-term discoverability and preservation. Data and documentation are being added to ICPSR’s DataLumos , a crowd-sourced repository for government data. Data has been rescued from many agencies including Center for Disease Control, the Department of Education, IMLS, FEMA, HUD, and SAMSHA. In addition, sites are nominated for the End of Term Crawl .
They have compiled an overview of ongoing efforts and helpful resources intended to help alleviate confusion and aid in the data rescue process:
- Current efforts
- Resources
- Data Rescue Tracker . Use to look up where data has been rescued and to nominate your efforts. It provides consolidated overviews of who is downloading which dataset from which government websites.
- If looking for a specific dataset, check out Downloads to see if it has been captured.
- If looking for ongoing initiatives and what focusing on, check out Maintainers .
- Use the Dataset Download Submission Form to help the project know of downloads or maintainers not yet in the project.
Data Rescue Tracker is a tool built to to catalog existing public data rescue efforts and to coordinate better across initiatives.
Subscribe to receive updates by email. 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.
While the focus is on federal USA data, DRP is grateful to individuals around the world who are contributing. The project is being applauded not only in the USA, but internationally and was featured in the French newspaper – Le Monde .
Bobray Bordelon, IASSIST Vice-President