From Crisis to Coordination: Building the Data Rescue Project for Rapid-Response US Federal Data Curation

In the first half of 2025, research data funded or maintained in whole or in part by the United States federal government were suddenly vulnerable in a hyper-visible manner. Funding was brought into sharp relief as it was no longer stable, threatening longitudinal research projects, the longevity of data and federal repositories, and the integrity of the data itself. This especially impacted data and resources containing topics that run contrary to the current administration’s ideologies. This led members of the IASSIST, RDAP, and DCN communities to coordinate efforts around rapid-response data curation, which included identifying funding agencies and datasets most at risk, coordinating volunteers to reduce duplication of efforts, and building out resources to support data collection. In a matter of days, our team consolidated to become the Data Rescue Project, building on previous data rescue efforts to implement a more robust workflow. In this poster, we will focus on sharing the growth and formalization of the Data Rescue Project. We will report on volunteer engagement, data captured, and resources we have created to support data rescue efforts. Additionally, we will reflect on experiences carrying out rapid-response coordination and the building of an involved and sustainable community infrastructure. While this project is based in the United States context, we hope our project pathway will be easily adaptable for other rapid response data curation projects.