But concern about the vulnerability of scientific information has also focused attention on a nonpartisan problem of digital-age government: Much of the scientific information so painstakingly collected over the decades,
- 7 years ago
But concern about the vulnerability of scientific information has also focused attention on a nonpartisan problem of digital-age government: Much of the scientific information so painstakingly collected over the decades,
at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, remains held only by the government, scattered on thousands of servers in hundreds of departments where it may not be backed up and could be impossible to find.
Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data — If They Can Find It -
By AMY HARMONMARCH 6, 2017
As the presidential inauguration drew near in January, something bordering on panic was taking hold among some scientists who rely on the vast oceans
of data housed on government servers, which encompass information on everything from social demographics to satellite photographs of polar ice.
“At the moment, more people than ever are aware of the risk of relying solely on the government to preserve its own information,’’ two government document librarians, James A. Jacobs, of the University of California, San Diego,
and James R. Jacobs of Stanford University, wrote in an essay circulated online last week.
One uses a web browser extension to flag government web addresses for the Internet Archive, an existing service
that operates an automated “web crawler” that can make copies of federal websites but typically not the databases that store information in more exotic formats.
“It’s like dark matter; we know it must be there but we don’t know where to find it to verify,” said Maxwell Ogden, the director of Code for Science and Society, a nonprofit
that began a government-data archiving project in collaboration with the research libraries in the University of California system.
“No one would advocate for a system where the government stores all scientific data
and we just trust them to give it to us,” said Laurie Allen, a digital librarian at the University of Pennsylvania who helped found Data Refuge.
at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, remains held only by the government, scattered on thousands of servers in hundreds of departments where it may not be backed up and could be impossible to find.
Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data — If They Can Find It -
By AMY HARMONMARCH 6, 2017
As the presidential inauguration drew near in January, something bordering on panic was taking hold among some scientists who rely on the vast oceans
of data housed on government servers, which encompass information on everything from social demographics to satellite photographs of polar ice.
“At the moment, more people than ever are aware of the risk of relying solely on the government to preserve its own information,’’ two government document librarians, James A. Jacobs, of the University of California, San Diego,
and James R. Jacobs of Stanford University, wrote in an essay circulated online last week.
One uses a web browser extension to flag government web addresses for the Internet Archive, an existing service
that operates an automated “web crawler” that can make copies of federal websites but typically not the databases that store information in more exotic formats.
“It’s like dark matter; we know it must be there but we don’t know where to find it to verify,” said Maxwell Ogden, the director of Code for Science and Society, a nonprofit
that began a government-data archiving project in collaboration with the research libraries in the University of California system.
“No one would advocate for a system where the government stores all scientific data
and we just trust them to give it to us,” said Laurie Allen, a digital librarian at the University of Pennsylvania who helped found Data Refuge.