Announcing The Data Rescue Project as the winner of the 2025 RDAP Work of the Year Award, which recognizes an outstanding publication, program, or other publicly available work related to research data access and preservation. The award acknowledges the work’s impact on the wider research and scholarly communication ecosystem in support of the RDAP Association’s mission and values.
We would specifically like to recognize the steering committee members who are RDAP members:
Lena Bohman
Halle Burns
Lynda Kellam
Mikala Narlock
Amy Nurnberger
We would also like to acknowledge Tess Grynoch, Data Rescue Project Liaison to RDAP and Past President of RDAP. While members of the Executive Committee of RDAP are not eligible for award benefits, we also thank Tess for her invaluable contributions to this project and to RDAP.
Statement from this year’s winner:
We asked the Steering Committee a few questions via email, to get some perspective on the work they have been doing. Here are their responses.
Q: Tell us a bit about your professional background and what motivated you to write this work.
While each of our backgrounds is slightly different, we all bring an interest and expertise in ensuring long-term access to data. Lynda brings a deep knowledge of government information and data; Halle and Mikala, an understanding of curatorial processes; Lena, the health data infrastructure; Amy and Tess, on research data management practices and considerations. This combined and varied expertise, alongside that of our fellow steering committee members Sebastian Majstrovic and Kathleen Burlingame, has all been essential as we built this effort in a matter of weeks.
Q: What other writing or projects inspired this work?
The Data Rescue Project launched from a moment of chaos, confusion, and anxiety. As many of us recall, after holding our breath in January 2025, the threats to government information materialized more quickly and with a broader scope than we had anticipated.
We are incredibly grateful for the efforts that came before us from across various fields. We have tapped into the work of government information librarians in Preservation of Electronic Government Information and the End of Term Web Archive. We have learned from digital humanists in Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO). And we have continued the work of the data rescue movement started by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative and the University of Pennsylvania’s Data Refuge in 2016/7. Moreover, we are eternally grateful that ICPSR developed Data Lumos in 2017 as a crowd-sourced repository for public data. These efforts also inspired the extension of our work beyond rescue to developing tools and platforms that better enable coordination of rescue activities and resources.
Q: How do you hope this work will impact the profession?
Our current data rescue efforts are helping to preserve public access to public data. We hope that researchers and the public will continue to have access to this public data, which may have otherwise been lost. In the long term, we recognize that events requiring data rescues will continue to occur around the world. Our goal is to create a template that other groups can use when the next data crisis hits, and beyond this, raise awareness around the real need for data resilience that could proactively mitigate the need for data rescues.
Q: Where do you see this work going next? What next steps or future research would you like to work on to continue or promote the idea?
In the short term, we will continue our work to date. This will include data rescues, of course, as well as presentations and articles in the works. We will remain connected to several other initiatives concerned about the longer-term resilience of the federal data infrastructure or other aspects of data rescue. We are also grateful to have had the opportunity to set up our own cloud data, using grant money received from the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation. Finally, we are holding a steering committee retreat in February to begin more long-term planning and building our best practice template for reuse by others.
About this award:
The Work of the Year award recognizes an outstanding publication, program, or other publicly available work related to research data access and preservation. The award acknowledges the work’s impact on the wider research and scholarly communication ecosystem in support of the RDAP Association’s mission and values. Nominated works can be produced by any number of individuals, but prize winners must be RDAP members, and prizes will be awarded to up to five individuals.
