ad CURRENT POSITION Director for Digital Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia DEGREE MSLIS, Simmons College, Boston, 2002 FOLLOW @librlaurie on Twitter; Data
Meet Laurie Allen, data rescuer.
Allen knew that before the new administration came in digital specialists were already downloading and storing publicly available government data, most notably the Internet Archive (which maintains the Wayback Machine) and the End of Term Archive, which since 2009 has done an end-of-term harvest that captures federal websites at risk of changing or disappearing. Both efforts needed help to capture the large quantities of information involved.
Allen and Bethany Wiggin, director of PPEH, and the Fellows decided the library would host a code-a-thon on January 13 and 14, 2017. Volunteers would secure copies of climate and environmental data housed on federal websites. After surveying scientists in the Committee for Concerned Scientists on the most at-risk data, the codirectors chose to start with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) websites. They created an online repository: www.datarefuge.org.
Data Refuge made copies of tens of thousands of websites and 395 data sets—in all, many “terabytes of data,” Allen says. “But the outcome of this work is probably not best measured in numbers…. The greater impact was in forging new partnerships and helping many people think differently about the ways we value and care for information for the long term.”