Students, staffers and librarians at Washington University are working to preserve critical federal data that in some cases has been removed from websites for agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In what is known as a hackathons, in which people collaborate to solve problems, WashU organized its version of the Data Rescue Project.
Vice Provost and University Librarian Mimi Calter said in a statement that the Data Rescue Project is part of a national effort to archive federal data.
“I’m thrilled that WashU libraries have been able to participate in the program, particularly now, as we are seeing such dramatic changes in the availability of these critical resources," Calter said. “Accessibility is core to the mission of the libraries, and having this opportunity to work with our community to address this need has been fulfilling for us and has enabled us to directly address a need of our faculty and students.”
Hackathons entail volunteers going through a spreadsheet of various websites from different federal agencies that have been deemed “at risk” of having their data deleted or temporarily removed, downloading the data and eventually moving it to a publicly accessible platform.
The at-risk designation is typically given to agencies that have been the target of President Donald Trump’s executive orders or his efforts to dramatically reshape them.
Although some of the federal data has been restored, Avianna Wooten, a data management and sharing specialist and lead coordinator for the Data Rescue Project at WashU, said that preserving it is critical.
“A lot of decisions and a lot of research [are] made utilizing this federal data,” Wooten said. “It is also publicly funded data, so it is something that we should theoretically have continued access to.”
For example, Wooten said she was contacted by a WashU researcher who was unable to access a publicly available dataset from the CDC’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System in early April.
Wooten was able to find the dataset on a crowdsourced repository of government data called DataLumos, which she said was only possible because someone had downloaded the data before it could be removed.
There have been four hackathons, which are open to the public, and have had over 100 participants, according to Wooten.
Esther Gabriel, a WashU librarian focused on special collections, said the hackathon gave her a tangible way to counter what she sees are destructive changes from the Trump administration.
“As a library and information professional, access to information is one of the key tenets of library work,” Gabriel said. “So for me personally, regardless of what the data is about and its potential uses, the elimination of access to those datasets is sort of an affront to my professional ethics.”
The Data Rescue hackathons will continue in a virtual format throughout the summer.
