FAQ
Welcome to the Data Rescue Project! We are excited to have you join us.
What is the Data Rescue Project?
The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Our goal is to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. You can read more about our efforts on our Resources about the Data Rescue Project page.
I'm worried about a specific dataset that isn't open to the public or contains sensitive information, such as NLEAD, PRAMS, HCUP, etc. Can the Data Rescue Project help?
There are many federal data sources that contain administrative, sensitive, identifiable, and/or restricted information. While this data is very important and may be at risk, legally, we are unable to collect or preserve this data. If you are concerned about losing access to an administrative or restricted federal dataset, please contact either your university's library, university's office of sponsored research, or a relevant government official.
How do I join the Data Rescue Project?
If you’d like to follow our work, please click Subscribe to receive our newsletter or follow our BlueSky account.
If you have time to do more, please fill out our volunteer interest form. Read the Community Guidelines before volunteering. In the form, let us know what interests and skills you have. All levels and backgrounds are welcome to join the effort.
Volunteers who have signed up through the interest form will be added to our self-hosted Mattermost (MM) chat platform. MM is an open-source application similar to Slack, but we host it on our own server. You will need to set up an account. We will do most of our discussions about the work within MM.
How can I help?
Regardless of your background or level of comfort with data, there are a number of tasks and projects underway, all requiring different skills and expertise. Check out our Getting Started with the Data Rescue Project page for more guidance on the tasks below.
Examples of potential tasks:
- Identifying data for download. You can nominate datasets or really any links on our Nominations Tool.
- Finding and confirming alternate locations of federal data
- Downloading data from federal resources
- Uploading data into Data Lumos
- Research assistance or answering reference questions
- Creating and updating inventories
- Identifying potential Data Rescue Project collaborators
- Submit metadata about the data your organization has rescued to our Data Rescue Project Portal using our Metadata Submission Form.
- Troubleshooting technical issues
- Review metadata and links for quality control using our Data Rescue Project Portal (if you prefer the spreadsheet view, check out the OG Tracker).
- Data curation, metadata, and data documentation
- And more!
How do I nominate a governmental digital object for rescue (datasets, webpages, etc)?
You can use our Nominations Tool to nominate digital objects you are concerned about. We will investigate the submission and decide if we have the capacity to take it on or if we will need to partner with another organization.
How do I get in touch?
You can email us at datarescueproject@protonmail.com. If you want to send us a secure, encrypted email, you can sign up for a free account at protonmail.com or use our public PGP key: https://keys.openpgp.org/search?q=datarescueproject%40protonmail.com.