Led by the Digital Library Federation, Endangered Data Week, February 26 – March 2, 2018, is an international, collaborative effort, coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, and cultural heritage institutions, to shed light on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. The goals of Endangered Data Week are to promote care for endangered collections by publicizing the availability of datasets; increasing critical engagement with them, including through visualization and analysis; and by encouraging political activism for open data policies and the fostering of data skills through workshops on curation, documentation and discovery, improved access, and preservation.
Partnering with University of Maryland Libraries, MITH hosted a roundtable to illuminate threats as well as ethical questions and best practices for working with endangered cultural heritage data. A hands-on workshop followed the panel, highlighting specific tools and approaches for preserving data.