Law Review Article: “Lessons from DataRescue: The Limits of Grassroots Climate Change Data Preservation and the Need for Federal Records Law Reform”

The following essay was recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Title
Lessons from DataRescue: The Limits of Grassroots Climate Change Data Preservation and the Need for Federal Records Law Reform
Author
Sarah Lamdan
CUNY School of Law
Source
166 U. Pa. L. Rev. Online 231 (2018)
From the Introduction

Shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election, but before his inauguration, a group of concerned scholars organized in cities and college campuses across the United States, starting with the University of Pennsylvania, to prevent climate change data from disappearing from government websites. The move was led by Michelle Murphy, a scholar who had previously observed the destruction of climate change data and muzzling of government employees in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration. The “guerrilla archiving” project soon swept the nation, drawing media attention as its volunteers scraped and preserved terabytes of climate change and other environmental data and materials from .gov websites. The archiving project felt urgent and necessary, as the federal government is the largest collector and archive of U.S. environmental data and information.

Direct to Full Text Article
18 pages; PDF.
Hat Tip: FreeGovInfo.info

Filed under: Data Files, News, Preservation