National Digital Stewardship Alliance Excellence Award

The Data Rescue Project was pleased to receive an NDSA Excellence Award last week. We were honored to be recognized alongside other incredible librarians, archivists, and leaders. Below is the transcript of remarks delivered by Lynda Kellam. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to all our volunteers for their valuable contributions to this effort.

We are honored that the National Digital Stewardship Alliance and the Excellence Awards Working Group chose to recognize us today. I want to first introduce the other founding organizers and members of our Steering Committee who have committed many hours since February to this effort.

Lena Bohman
Mikala Narlock
Halle Burns
Tess Grynoch
Kathleen Burlingame
Amy Nurnberger
Sebastian Majstorovic

A special thank you goes to Sebastian and the Steering Committee of the organization Saving Ukrainian cultural Heritage Online or SUCHO. Without SUCHO's support, we would not have had the infrastructure to create the DRP.

Also a big shout-out goes to Maggie Levenstein and her staff at ICSPR at the Univ of Michigan. In 2016, they created a tool called DataLumos that has been essential to making sure public data remains accessible. Without this repository, discovering and using rescued data would be an even greater challenge.

We also work with many other partners in the data rescue, data preservation, and data advocacy communities. We are lucky to have caring colleagues in other organizations, which means that we never have to travel this road alone.

Finally, I want to recognize the MANY volunteers who have participated in data rescues. What has kept me hopeful during these trying times has been the work of people from all sectors of life. They have spent countless hours working to ensure that public data remains a public good that is publicly accessible. All of our appreciation goes to them!

This award is in their honor.

❤️🛟