How Data Refuge works, and how YOU can help save federal open data : Sunlight Foundation

"Working with partners, especially with our librarians at Penn, Data Refuge aims to accomplish three goals:

Use our trustworthy system to make research-quality copies of federal climate and environmental data. The types of public data we copy range from satellite imaging to PDFs, and we augment the work of webcrawling by our partners at End of Term Harvest and the Internet Archive by developing tools to download and describe 'uncrawlables' that can be put in the public server space available at www.datarefuge.org

Advocate for environmental literacy with storytelling projects that showcase how federal environmental data support health and safety in our local communities; and advocate for more robust archiving of born-digital materials as well as for more reliable access to them. They are, after all, paid for by American taxpayers.

Build a consortium of research libraries to scale data refuge’s tools and practices to make copies of other kinds of federal data beyond the environment. This budding consortium, supported by the Association of Research Libraries, will supplement the existing system of federal depository libraries, where printed documents are 'pushed.' This new consortium could actively 'pull' public materials, i.e., copy them, from federal agencies."