Saving data, saving history. The Data Rescue Project

From KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dime. The Trump administration has removed a lot of things from the federal government since the inauguration. It's removed thousands of federal workers, it's removed the name Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico, and it's removed scores of historical facts from places like national parks. But perhaps the most impactful deletion that the administration has made is the terabytes of critical data removed from public access under the guise of not meeting the administration's priorities. Well, in answer to this unprecedented scrubbing of public data, a plucky band of librarians and academicians have stepped into the breach to save this critical information. Today on the show, you'll hear from the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots group of volunteers who have scoured the internet and other sources to save vital data that was in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. In the movie The Monuments Men, a ragtag bunch of historians led by George Clooney go behind enemy lines to rescue precious works of art in World War II Germany. It reminds me of an action being undertaken right now in cyberspace where a ragtag bunch of librarians are working to rescue data that is being deleted by the federal government. You'll meet the organization's director now, Linda Kellum, the director of the Data Rescue Project. Linda, thank you so much for taking time out to talk with us.

Thank you for having me.

Let's just start with this. What is the Data Rescue Project?

So we are a volunteer network that started in February 2025 in response to some of the attacks against federal public data and federal public data that we considered at risk. So most of us are librarians or we've been working as a lot of us work as data librarians in universities and uh our group has expanded way beyond that over the past 19 now going into 20 months um but we are originally librarians who were very concerned about the loss of public data and wanted to make sure we could make it uh both back it up but also make it available to the public and we've been working to do that for the past for a while now

What was the impetus to start this organization? Was there a singular event or was it just a lot of things that you were seeing? And I guess, how did you form? I mean, it sounds like, boy, a lot of librarians and academicians getting together to form this group. How did that sort of happen?

Yeah, so some of us had actually been involved in 2017 efforts to protect climate environmental data, or had connections into that 2017 effort. And so we knew of what had happened then and wanted to, and we're concerned about what might happen in 2025. At the time, though, it wasn't clear, you know, in 2017, not a lot of data was brought down. There were it was kind of anticipatory work at that time. And we just didn't see the takedowns that we've seen this year. when the big galvanizing event was the removal of a lot of data on the CDC's website, especially the BRFSS, which is the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a major resource for researchers, as well as many other people. Our community started receiving emails from our patrons, from