Collaborative Stewardship of Government Information Across Legacy and Born-Digital Formats
Merrilee Proffitt
Director, Democracy’s Library US
Internet Archive
This presentation will overview how the Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and the Institute of Governmental Studies Library at the University of California (UC) Berkeley have collaborated to preserve and provide open access to government records and publications across legacy analog formats (books, paper records, microforms) and contemporary born-digital content. Drawing on efforts including the digitization of important federal materials in both Canada and the United States, the US End of Term web archive, and the LoCal Digitization Project’s ongoing unification of dispersed local government documents, the session will explore how cross-institutional stewardship can enable new forms of research and public use. Beyond capture, the session focuses on designing collections and services responsive to researcher workflows, including longitudinal and cross-jurisdictional analysis, improved discovery, bulk access, and computational use. It will discuss prioritizing collections, metadata strategies, and infrastructure decisions. Because government information and publications are widely and redundantly held across CNI member institutions, the session will highlight opportunities for coordinated digitization, aggregation, and service development that extend the impact of work already underway. The presentation was developed in collaboration with Kathryn Stine (Digitization Project Planner, Institute of Governmental Studies Library, UC Berkeley), Kris Kasianovitz (Director, Institute of Governmental Studies Library, UC Berkeley), and Andrea Mills (Executive Director, Internet Archive Canada).
https://archive.org/details/democracys-library
https://igs.berkeley.edu/library/ca-local-documents-digitization-project
Building a Resilient Ecosystem for Publicly-Funded Research Data
Kristi Holmes
Professor and Director of Galter Health Sciences Library
Northwestern University
The Center for Open Science, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is leading a community-driven initiative to develop a strategic plan to ensure the long-term preservation, accessibility, and usability of publicly funded scientific data. This project emerged in response to the 2025 sudden removal of public data from multiple federal agency websites, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in scientific data infrastructure. The initiative convenes experts across research, policy, and data infrastructure to coordinate approaches that strengthen and sustain access to data generated through federal funding. The project aims to complement existing efforts by developing a framework for long-term stewardship of federally funded scientific data. Focus areas include monitoring at-risk repositories, ensuring the resilience of data repositories, promoting repository sustainability and resilience, and developing an outreach and advocacy framework to raise awareness among researchers, funders, policymakers, and the public. This effort aims to inform community-wide data stewardship practices and support the broader movement toward transparent and sustainable research data management.
https://www.cos.io/ensuring-preservation-accessibility-usability-of-public-data
Documenting Disruption: Collecting and Communicating About Rapid Change in the Scientific Enterprise (Lightning Talk)
Trevor Owens
Chief Research Officer
American Institute of Physics
Amid rapid policy and funding shifts under the second Trump Administration, the American Institute of Physics is leading efforts to document and preserve records and data of disruption across the US physical science enterprise. This talk highlights how an interdisciplinary team of historians, librarians, archivists, and social scientists is building infrastructures to capture contemporary change through story collecting, data analysis, and digital preservation. These initiatives aim not only to inform future scholarship but to empower communities today to navigate and shape scientific futures. We invite collaborators from across the CNI community to collaborate and help document, preserve, and explore change and resilience in the scientific enterprise.
https://www.aip.org/library/ex-libris-universum/physical-science-careers-disrupted
