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To help coordinate and support the work of saving government data, ensure that individual efforts didn’t duplicate one another, and provide a secure, accessible repository for archived material, a group of concerned librarians created the Data Rescue Project (DRP). A “clearinghouse” for data preservation efforts, DRP builds on efforts that began during Trump’s first term. LJ spoke with DRP organizer Lynda Kellam about the project and to learn more about how to get involved.

Capturing and preserving information has long been part of the library mission. As the world grapples with the wide range of threats climate change presents to the environment, ecosystems, and society, we can make a difference by keeping people informed.

In January, the HBCU Library Alliance announced the award of a $1,000,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support its multipart program “Empowering HBCU Libraries with Civil Rights Preservation, Digital Innovation, and Transformative Professional Development.”

The Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab (LIL) has created a data vault to download, authenticate, and provide access to copies of public government data that may be in danger of disappearing. The project will collect major portions of the datasets tracked by data.gov, federal GitHub depositories, and PubMed—information of value for researchers, scholars, and policymakers. When the public-facing site launched on February 6, the data vault had collected metadata and primary contents for more than 300,000 datasets available on data.gov.

Established in 2013 in Corvallis, OR, the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive at Oregon State University aims to collect and preserve books, periodicals, ephemera, and artifacts about brewing and hops farming in the Pacific Northwest. The university has a department dedicated to food science and technology under its College of Agricultural Sciences, as well as its own Research Brewery, and since 1995 has offered one of the few Fermentation Science programs in the country. But it would take a department merger and a wedding to spark the creation of the archive.

Chartered by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC, holds the distinction of being the only bilingual university for Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and other Deaf Disabled students in the world. Consequently, it has the world’s largest archives of materials related to deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, with a mission to preserve “the institutional memory of the University and historic material from the global Deaf community,” according to the Gallaudet website.

As Lorcan Dempsey, formerly with OCLC, observed in portal: Libraries and the Academy (2008), “discovery happens elsewhere”—that is, people are using internet search engines, recommendations from social media, or emails from friends and colleagues to discover content. Search can be a powerful tool, provided you know what you are looking for. Yet there are significant problems associated with the search process.

While there are many botanical gardens across the United States, only one has the distinction of being a tropical botanical garden chartered by the U.S. Congress: the National Tropical Botanical Garden, located in Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi.

Dr. Colleen Shogan took the oath of office as the 11th Archivist of the United States—the chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—in May 2023, succeeding former Archivist David Ferriero. She is the first woman to permanently hold the role. LJ caught up with Shogan to hear about her national tour of presidential libraries, NARA’s stepped-up digitization efforts, and preserving the record of presidential cat Socks.