The federal government does not have, and to our knowledge, has never had, a mandate of preserving the data they create and disseminate. As one of the world’s oldest and largest data archives for social and behavioral sciences, ICPSR is in a unique position to be able to ensure long-term viability of the data that are at risk or already removed. Specifically, our mission is to preserve data as well as simply making it available at a given point in time. ICPSR's infrastructure guarantees the data can be found through descriptive metadata, used, and archived for future retrieval, should the need arise.

This talk will discuss the efforts taken since late January 2025 to acquire and preserve data that were at risk of being made unavailable. Hopefully, this overview will lead to an engaging conversation about what was done and what needs to be done.