(Alan Piñon, U-M Library)
More than 275 volunteers from U-M and around the community converged on Shapiro Library on January 27 and 28 in an emergency effort to preserve scientific data that is at risk of disappearing from government websites. The effort, called Ann Arbor Data Rescue, was organized by librarians and students at U-M and is part of the national Data Refuge project and the Internet Archive’s End of Term Presidential Harvest. “The goal of this project is to raise greater awareness about the fragility of government data and to assist in its preservation on a larger scale than is currently done,” said Justin Schell, director of the Shapiro Design Lab at the U-M Library. “We’re also responding to concerns from faculty about specific kinds of important federal data that may disappear in the coming months.”
