On Saturday, February 4th, 2017, several students from the Department led by Professor Jerome Whitington, participated in a Data Rescue event designed to archive and protect several websites on climate change, environmental data, and energy usage that could be threatened by our current Trump administration. Below is a statement from Professor Whitington detailing the success of the event:

“[The event] went off extremely well – about 160 people were involved, we archived a lot of federal websites and data especially from the Dept of Energy and Dept of Interior, and some other important work as well.It’s pretty heartening to see so many people engaged with environmental information and regulatory systems to such a degree of detail. Notably, we hosted a meeting among some key librarians around the country. It seems university librarians have been discussing a plan to systematically archive government data for about two decades, and some work has been done but there has never been a push to actually get it running. Due to the popular demand for this, there is now a movement for big libraries to create trusted data reserves linked in with their indexing systems. If this comes online it will be a very big win for us.”

The event was also covered extensively in the press. You can read articles about it here, here, here, and here.