This file hosts a submission to the ArchivesSpace Online Forum taking place on 18 March 2019. It was submitted shortly before the deadline on February 18, 2019.
An archival perspective on public health emergencies
Public health emergencies require profound and swift action at scale with limited resources, often on the basis of incomplete information and frequently under rapidly evolving circumstances. While emergency-triggered sharing goes back millennia, the sharing of data and associated metadata is a relatively new flavour under this broader theme, but one that has been receiving steadily growing attention over the last few years, especially in the context of the Ebola or Zika outbreaks. By now, we have reached a point where data sharing must be considered a key component of addressing present, future and even past public health emergencies.
In response, researchers, research institutions, journals, funders and others have taken steps towards increasing the sharing of data around ongoing public health emergencies and in preparation for future ones. These measures range from the adoption of open lab notebooks to modifications of policies and funding lines, and they include conversations around infrastructure and cultural change as well as around the provenance and persistence of emergency-related resources.
This presentation will be given on the basis of https://github.com/Daniel-Mietchen/events/blob/master/ArchivesSpace-Online-Forum-2019-emergencies.md and provide an overview of different ways in which the sharing of data has played a role in public health emergencies, highlighting steps that have already been taken over the last decade as well as challenges still lying ahead and concluding with considerations around the potential impact of preserving and sharing data or associated metadata, or failing at that.
I will use this section to prepare the presentation.