Rescuing U.S. Government Data

As noted in a previous post about the Society for Military History, the scholarly community has been alarmed by the removal of U.S. government websites and datasets. There is a wider effort now to rescue and archive as much information from government websites as possible for the wider academic community.

The Data Rescue Project serves as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public U.S. federal data that are currently at risk. The project, a coalition of data organisations including IASSIST, RDAP and the Data Curation Network, among others, and individuals has focussed on collating, collecting, curating, and providing sustained public access and distribution of data. The Data Rescue Tracker, a collaborative tool to catalogue and coordinate across data rescue efforts. The tool can be used to see where data has been rescued, search for specific datasets, learn about ongoing data rescue initiatives, and submit downloaded data and where it has been archived for continuing findability and access.