Every Data Its User
The following is a summary of Dr. Lynda Kellam and Mikala Narlock’s closing keynote at IDCC 2026. The slides are available in the IDCC 2026 Zenodo Collection.
Thank you so much. It’s genuinely an honor to be here with this community. In today’s presentation, we argue that the success of data rescue and preservation efforts is situated in the community we have built. It’s not about the amount of data we’ve rescued or the technology we’ve employed. Instead, the power of data rescue lies in the relationships we’ve built across professions, across institutions, and across borders.
Those coalitions matter to us as librarians and data professionals. But, ultimately and more importantly, they matter because efforts to back up and advocate for public data underpin our functioning as democratic societies.
To understand why this work matters, we need to understand the scale of the system we’re dealing with. The United States federal government is among the world’s largest producers of public data: from economic statistics, to environmental measures, to demographic indicators, to health data and beyond.
But this system is decentralized and complex. It includes thirteen major statistical agencies with a primary focus on producing data and statistics for the United States. Plus, hundreds of offices within those and other agencies that also produce data. They have multiple publication and dissemination models and operate relatively independently of each other.
Most of the data they produce is in the public domain. Which means, at least in theory, it is accessible to and belongs to the people of the United States. Moreover, federal public data are widely trusted and often seen as the most authoritative sources on certain topics. Because of this and because the data are in the public domain, our datasets are often invisibly embedded into other systems. They are reused in academic research, policy analysis, journalism, and commercial products. Federal data permeate our everyday lives, whether we are aware of them or not. And unfortunately many Americans are not aware.
But trust is not the same thing as security.
In 2025, a convergence of shifting political priorities, restructurings, and budget cuts threatened how data is collected, maintained, and accessed. While few datasets have been fully removed, as Denice Ross, former U.S. Chief Data Officer, put it: Even when datasets remain technically online, many are at risk of “death by a thousand cuts”. The infrastructure around those datasets has been weakened by the loss of staff, expertise, contracts, and advisory committees.
These vulnerabilities aren't entirely new; federal data has always been at risk during administrative transitions, which is why efforts like the End of Term Web Archive exist. However, web scraping alone can't capture the nested structures, documentation, and interactive tools that make datasets truly usable.
Another rapid response data capture group we looked to was the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online effort, or SUCHO. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off a land war and threatening the cultural heritage maintained by Ukrainian galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. A call went out to do emergency archiving, and a team was formalized by early March. In a short time, SUCHO captured hundreds of terabytes of data and had hundreds of volunteers.
These past efforts demonstrate, first, people care and recognize the importance of these types of digital artifacts from federal data and government information to cultural heritage products; and second, crowdsourcing if mobilized effectively and directed in an effective manner, can serve as a successful rapid response in moments of crisis.
To date, DRP has identified and preserved over two thousand five hundred at-risk datasets from over ninety agencies and has interacted with over nine hundred volunteers.
But the more important outcome is harder to quantify. We’ve helped build an active, diverse, international community of people who care deeply about the future of public data and who now know how to act together.
What moments like this demand is not just better technology but stronger coalitions. We have been working beyond libraries and researchers, connecting with nonprofits, public advocacy groups, and other communities. By working together, we can do more.
The crisis moment brought us together. The challenge now is to sustain that collaboration. The solutions will be based on those coalitions, not on technology.
But rather than focus on the past, we want to reflect on what we have learned going into the future. To do that we need to be clear about our values. In library school, many of us learned Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science. These were created by S. R. Ranganathan, an Indian librarian widely recognized as one of the leading figures in library science.
- Books are for use.
- Every reader their book.
- Every book its reader
- Save the time of the reader.
- A library is a growing organism.
While Raganathan talked about books, the last law points to why this is still applicable to us. Data are a form of information that librarians must protect as much as other forms. In addition to expanding to new formats, our focus is on access to information of all kinds. Librarians have a responsibility to protect access to public information of all kinds, including datasets. Access is core to our mission.
The DRP operates within a broader coalition — including PEDP, the Data Foundation, the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, ESIP, and others — each contributing distinct expertise. That coalition has celebrated shared wins, showed up under pressure, and resisted competing for credit. Building these communities and thinking about our foundational laws demonstrate that federal data access is about far more than academic research. Access to federal data is about equal access to information across all of society. And that access or lack of it will have direct impact on our democracy. Why? Because an informed electorate with access to information is a fundamental requisite for a functioning democracy.
As the United States marks its two hundred and fiftieth year, we’ve seen actions against the federal statistical system that undermine our ability to have an informed electorate. We’ve seen misinformation and outright lies from our leaders. With the rise of AI and the decline of grant funding, our corporations profit while our universities bleed.
Our coalition-based work to provide continued access to public data is ultimately about the future of democratic society. Beliefs in these fundamental truths are what guide us.
2025 was a really hard year for us, professionally and personally. Professionally, we saw threats to information of all types, including increased book ban attempts at american public libraries, heightened pressures on academic institutions, and of course the altering and removal of federal data. Personally, we witnessed the foundations of our democracy erode in real time, and lived through chaos that made daily life feel difficult, such as threats to our reproductive and civil rights, new tariffs and foreign policies, and, for many of us, a feeling of powerlessness to impact meaningful change. There were many days I struggled with just showing up, let alone believing in a new way, a better way.
But the DRP community has reminded us daily that hope is resistance. The fervent willingness to show up and work to make things better is how things get better. So, as devastating as 2025 was, we are optimistic this is a chance to rebuild, with an emphasis on community and coalitions. Let’s take the blocks we have in place and create something resilient, something welcoming.
As we wrap, this work is possible only due to the members of the DRP– and I don’t just mean the steering committee members, pictured here! There are hundreds of volunteers who make this work possible.
Thomas Jefferson is often quoted as writing, “A well-informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny.” In 2026, the protection against tyranny requires access to information in a variety of forms. To paraphrase Rangathan’s third law, every data its user. And while access to public data is only the first step in data literacy, it is the essential starting place, and one the Data Rescue Project will continue to advocate for.
