Jeff Williams

The Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine, has been capturing snapshots of the World Wide Web for over 20 years. But a new effort to save a specific type of Internet content- scientific data- has emerged among some scientists and professors. Groups like the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and its offshoot Data Refuge are committed to preserving “…the facts we need at a time of ongoing climate change.”

These groups encourage others to download and store public scientific data. They’ve acted as a catalyst for groups around the country to host data meetups. At Nexla, we are committed to building tools that make it easier to collaborate with data. In that spirit, we’d like to share two of the methods we’ve found for archiving important data sets.