News

Update for October 2025

Photo by deniz ürgün / Unsplash

Hello from the DRP Steering Committee! We have a few updates. ❤️🛟

Announcements

Join us for office hours this coming Wednesday, October 29, at 4:30 pm Eastern. The HIFLD volunteers will be taking over to chat about the project! Use this link for the office hours. Thank you again to all who have been involved.
DataLumos now has over 1,000 datasets from this year alone, and there have been over 9,000 downloads. Especially noteworthy are HIFLD entries, USAID Education Data, and DC Crime Statistics. These data were made available thanks to the efforts of a broad community, including DRP volunteers.
The #SaveOurSigns campaign has released the SOS Archive, a public dataset of the crowd-sourced images.
Kathleen is working on updating our Data Rescue Project Portal. Let us know if anyone is interested in helping with quality control and clean up!
The DRP Steering Committee has been busy spreading the word about DRP and the importance of public data. Below are just a few:
- Lena presented for the Alabama Library Association Government Documents Round Table.
- Datadarner presented at International Data Week.
- Mikala gave a keynote at the Midwest Data Librarians Symposium.
- Lynda and Lena gave a short talk at the British Library’s Open & Engaged Conference 2025.

Upcoming

Tess and Lena have been hard at work preparing for another RDAP/DRP Hackathon on November 13 at 1:00 pm Eastern.
Lynda will join Sebastian in France for a panel discussion at the Numérique en Commun[s] conference. If anyone is in the area and wants to meet for coffee, let us know!
Halle and Mikala have plans to do an AMA around data rescue. Stay tuned!

Read about DRP and more

Dearly Departed Datasets - Nominate your favorite federal datasets that have been eliminated or removed!
Jones-Reid, Varina. “Data Horror Story: Politically-motivated data purges.” University of Aberdeen Library Blog. October 24, 2025.
Guldalian, Andrea. "The Data Rescue Project: Preserving Government Data Is a Tech & Community Issue." AALL Spectrum. November/December 2025.
Roth, Fallon. "Hundreds of photos of exhibits at Independence Park have been preserved online amid Trump’s efforts to sanitize history." Philadelphia Inquirer. October 15. 2025.

Events! RDAP Hackathon and HIFLD Office Hours

Before we talk about events, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our community of volunteers for your interest in and support for the project to back up HIFLD Open. HIFLD Open was a collection of open datasets that acted as a “digital go bag” for communities

Guest Post: Former Climate.gov team building Climate.us—a new bridge between scientists and the public

We have a guest post this week from the Climate.us team. We were very excited to talk with Rebecca Lindsey and learn more about their team's plans for Climate.us, especially their rescue of the Fifth National Climate Assessment. In 2024, if you googled “climate,” the first

Save Our Signs Launches the People’s Archive of National Park Signs

The Save Our Signs project (SOS), a community-driven effort to preserve National Park Service (NPS) interpretive materials before they are removed from public view, is proud to announce the launch of the Save Our Signs Archive, a collection of photographs taken by visitors at National Parks. This open access “people’

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

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Events! RDAP Hackathon and HIFLD Office Hours

Guest Post: Former Climate.gov team building Climate.us—a new bridge between scientists and the public

Save Our Signs Launches the People’s Archive of National Park Signs

National Digital Stewardship Alliance Excellence Award