Endangered Data Week - April 17-21, 2017
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-04-12
Summary:
"Endangered Data Week is a new, collaborative effort, coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, and cultural heritage institutions, to shed light on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. The week's events can promote care for endangered collections by: publicizing the availability of datasets; increasing critical engagement with them, including through visualization and analysis; and by encouraging political activism for open data policies and the fostering of data skills through workshops on curation, documentation and discovery, improved access, and preservation.
Why now?
Political events in the United States have shed new light on the fragility of publicly administered data. In just the first few weeks of the Trump administration and 115th Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency was allegedly ordered to remove climate change information from its website, the USDA removed animal welfare data from its website, and the House passed H.Res.5, specifically excluding changes to the Affordable Care Act from mandatory long-term cost data analysis. The Senate and House of Representatives have both received proposed bills (S.103 and H.R.482) prohibiting funding from being used 'to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.' While researchers, archivists, librarians, and watchdog groups work hard to create and preserve open data, there's little guarantee that information under federal control will always survive changes to federal agencies.
[...]
Toward a culture of data consciousness
Our public data will not be saved through a one-time mass backup, nor by distributed and uncoordinated, small acts of heroism. And, as the research data management community well knows, privately administered data is also under threat, often of benign neglect. We see Endangered Data Week as a service to projects like those listed above, and to the broader community of people who care about access to information. Together, we must: work for strong federal, state, and local open data policies; increase data skills and competencies among students and colleagues; and continue to shed light, year after year, on threats to data collections from all sources. An annual series of events, coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, and cultural heritage institutions and spanning disciplines and types of datasets can shed light on public information that is in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. Through this project, we hope to: raise awareness of different types of threats to publicly available data; engage with the power dynamics involved in data creation, sharing, and retention; foster concrete skills and collaborative projects; and highlight work to make endangered data more secure and accessible."