FAQ
Welcome to the Data Rescue Project! We are excited to have you join us.
What is the Data Rescue Project?
The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Our goal is to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk.
How can I help?
Regardless of your background or level of comfort with data, there are a number of tasks and projects under way, all requiring different skills and expertise.
Examples of potential tasks:
- Identifying data for download
- Finding and confirming alternate locations of federal data
- Downloading data from federal resources
- Uploading data into Data Lumos
- Research assistance or answering reference questions
- Creating and updating inventories
- Identifying potential Data Rescue Project collaborators
- Troubleshooting technical issues
- Data curation, metadata, and data documentation
- And more!
How do I join the Data Rescue Project?
If you’d like to follow our work, please click Subscribe to receive our newsletter or follow our BlueSky account.
If you have time to do more, please fill out our volunteer interest form. Read the Community Guidelines before volunteering. In the form, let us know what interests and skills you have. All levels and backgrounds are welcome to join the effort.
Volunteers who have signed up through the interest form will be added to our self-hosted Mattermost (MM) chat platform. MM is an open-source application similar to Slack, but we host it on our own server. You will need to set up an account. We will do most of our discussions about the work within MM.
How do I get in touch?
You can email us at datarescueproject@protonmail.com. If you want to send us a secure, encrypted email, you can sign up for a free account at protonmail.com or use our public PGP key: https://keys.openpgp.org/search?q=datarescueproject%40protonmail.com.