In celebration of anchors: The Data Rescue Project's fast + Slow development

Starting in January 2025, the US data landscape underwent dramatic changes. Threats to federal funding—and by extension, federal datasets—prompted urgent preservation efforts. What began as hurried Slack conversations, a rapidly expanding Google Doc, and last-minute meetings, quickly evolved into the Data Rescue Project. As an independent coalition of data librarians, scientists, journalists, and anyone passionate about data preservation, our group has flourished over time, bringing with that growth a distinctive set of challenges. We are navigating the tension between urgency and expansion versus deliberate and sustainable approaches. We have sought to balance the project’s potential with our capacity, learning when to decline requests, direct inquiries to other resources, or dive in wholeheartedly. In this presentation, attendees will discover not only the work of the Data Rescue Project, but also how we have integrated intentional, sustainable methodology into our efforts—including our successes and areas for continued improvement.