Date: October 28 2025 (Scary Data Week)
Hosted by: Geospatial Research Lab (Scary Data Week programming)
Instructor: Jessica Breen, PhD (Program Director, Geospatial Research Support) and Olivia Ivey, MLIS, MSSW (Assistant Librarian)
Tags: Data Preservation • Civic Data • Workshop
Digital data doesn’t always stay put. Websites change, tools disappear, and valuable datasets can quietly slip offline—sometimes forever. In this Scary Data Week workshop, you’ll learn how to bring data “back from the dead” using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. We’ll explore how and why datasets vanish, walk through the steps of preserving webpages, and give you the chance to reanimate a dataset of your own. No technical experience required—just curiosity, a laptop, and a willingness to protect public knowledge from the digital grave. Whether you’re a researcher, student, or data enthusiast, you’ll leave this session with practical skills and a deeper understanding of the role you can play in preserving civic information.
- Slides (PDF):
slides.pdf
- Why public datasets and civic information disappear
- Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover lost content
- Practical steps for capturing and preserving web resources
- Reanimating datasets and documenting preservation work
- The role of libraries and researchers in sustaining access to knowledge
This workshop was part of Scary Data Week at American University Library.
Content was developed and delivered by the Geospatial Research Lab.
Breen, J. and Olivia Ivey (2025). Data Preservation Workshop: Bringing Data Back from the Dead! (workshop materials).
Geospatial Research Lab, American University Library.
https://github.com/GeospatialResearchLab/workshop_data_preservation_2025