Harvard Library Guide to Public Data Conservation

Public data collected and maintained by federal, state, and municipal governments is a critical resource for the Harvard community. Harvard Library is committed to helping researchers maintain access to the information they rely on.  
 
This guide provides resources and recommended pathways for researchers concerned about sustained access to publicly available data – whether for replicating already published research, ensuring research integrity, supporting new work, or ensuring the transparency and durability of public knowledge.  
 
If you are concerned about losing access to public datasets, we recommend and support the following two approaches. 

The community-based resources listed below are already engaged in efforts to capture and maintain access to public datasets. We encourage researchers to participate in these efforts, incorporate open practices into their own research, and make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable ("FAIR") for others, now and into the future. 

• Data Rescue Project – A coordinated effort among a group of data organizations for data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets. 
• Data Rescue Tracker – Part of the Data Rescue Project and a collaborative tool built to catalog existing public “data rescue” efforts to coordinate better across initiatives. 
• DataLumos – An Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) archive for valuable government data resources. ICPSR provides meaningful and enduring access to curated social science data.  
• Data Liberation Project – An initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest. 
• Academic and professional communities including EDGI, COPAFS, and IASSIST are also deeply engaged in this work. Reach out to your local School library for more disciplinary-specific information.

If you are not able to access a needed dataset using the resources listed above, please use this form to nominate it for conservation and preservation. The nomination will be reviewed by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) and the Office of General Counsel (OGC), and further guidance will be provided after the initial review.  

You may also contact your School librarian for the most up-to-date information and resources in your discipline. They can help you navigate subject-specific data access issues and connect you with additional public data conservation resources available at your School.

• Open Scholarship and Research Data Services (OSRDS), Harvard Library
  • Contact: hl_osrds@harvard.edu 
• Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
  • Len Levin, Interim Library Director, Countway Library
    • Contact: leonard_levin@hms.harvard.edu 
• Faculty of Arts and Sciences 
  • Hugh Truslow, Head, Social Sciences and Visualization, Harvard Library
    • Contact: truslow@fas.harvard.edu 
  • Ehsan Moghadam, Data Services Librarian for the Sciences, Cabot Library
    • Contact: ehsan_moghadam@harvard.edu 
• Graduate School of Design 
  • Bruce Boucek, Senior GIS and Data Librarian
    • Contact: bboucek@gsd.harvard.edu  
• Curricular and Research Services Team, Harvard Business School 
  • Contact: infoservices@hbs.edu 
• Harvard Divinity School 
  • Contact: research@hds.harvard.edu 
• Harvard Graduate School of Education 
  • Lindsay Skay Whitacre, Assistant Director, Open Scholarship and Data Services Librarian
    • Contact: lindsay_whitacre@gse.harvard.edu  
• HKS Research & Data Services, Harvard Kennedy School of Government 
  • Contact: research-data@hks.harvard.edu
• Library Innovation Lab, Harvard Law School Library
  • Contact: publicdata@law.harvard.edu

This information, and the efforts it describes, are provided by a collaboration among the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Harvard Library, and Harvard University Information Technology.