Social Movements & the Law

At the Harvard Law School Library, we have 39 early manuscript copies of Magna Carta, and now we also have over 300,000 public datasets published by the United States federal government. In February, our Library Innovation Lab launched the Data.gov Archive, a 17-terabyte archive of every dataset published on data.gov by the U.S. federal government. The archive […]

There are many individuals, organizations, and community-based efforts to capture and preserve data in early 2025. Below are the efforts we are aware of and their collecting scopes. This list was developed from the original Data Rescue Google Doc. If you would like to add your efforts, please email us

Ofelia Zepeda is a renowned poet and linguist, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the Tohono O’odham language.

The bills would have applied the state's obscenity laws to local libraries and allow counties and cities to terminate library board members.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on May 23 reversed a district court’s preliminary injunction and dismissed free speech claims in Little v. Llano County, a Texas case challenging the removal of 17 books from a public library.

Alt Text: White words on blue background stating “Rather than succumbing to helplessness, the response is to do something, take a step, find your work, and commit to it.” Allison Jennin…

A simple declaration can open up space for community and pathways for action.

As always, the Data Rescue Project loves highlighting partners and initiatives. Today, we celebrate the Tracking Gov Info Project! The Tracking Gov Info Project is a crowdsourcing effort to track removed and modified government information and resources. Although the news media have widely reported the current U.S. administration's removal

I wrote this piece on libraries and possible educational responses as part of a longer contribution on the informational disciplines and the iSchool. A principal goal was to suggest that libraries present interesting and challenging research and educational questions, which cross disciplines.

International students’ perspectives are key to college papers covering White House policies on campus, but students fearing deportation are reluctant to speak.

Thomas Jefferson wanted to donate his personal collection of books to the Library of Congress. But critics thought those books were un-American.

Carla Hayden, the first African American to hold the post, was fired over diversity initiatives.

Building Psychological Safety in Academic Libraries: Fostering Innovation, Well-Being, and Engaged Teams

Fearing funding cuts, the anti-sexual-violence organization RAINN barred referring callers to resources for L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants and other marginalized groups.

The American Historical Association has released a statement condemning the removal of 381 books from the United States Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library.

The Supreme Court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for a group of immigrants in northern Texas, siding with Venezuelans who feared they were poised for imminent removal under the sweeping wartime authority.

The U.S. Army will alter the records of transgender soldiers to show only their sex at birth, according to internal guidance seen by Reuters that details a series of steps it will take as it pushes them out of the service.

Opening Statement: In a democracy founded on the rule of law, the independence of the legal profession is not merely a professional concern, it is a public necessity. Recent events involving ...

In a thorough rebuke, federal judge John G. McConnell has ordered the Trump administration to immediately reverse the mass terminations of grants and staff at IMLS.

May is Jewish American Heritage Month. Join ARL in honoring this community by viewing our round-up of events, blog posts, and resources from our member libraries. Events | Blog...

ARL shines a spotlight on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander heritage during the month of May. View our round-up of events, blogs, and other resources. Events | Blog...

"Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment. Removal Acts takes its speaker's fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of "removal" in its many forms-as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit-Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication"--

"To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the U.S. who claim Native identity has exploded -- increasing 85 percent in just ten years -- the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are Tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe. Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity -- her own story of enrollment and the enrollment of her children -- she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today's Tribal identity policing. She faces the question that many Native people do: Who is Indian enough?" --

In a society where unconscious bias, microaggressions, institutionalized racism, and systemic injustices are so deeply ingrained, healing is an ongoing process. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of those like us, and to blame others. This book profoundly shows that in order to have the difficult conversations required for working toward racial justice, inner work is essential. Through the practice of embodied mindfulness--paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way--we increase our emotional resilience, recognize our own biases, and become less reactive when triggered.

With a combination of thorough research, astute analysis, and illuminating personal narrative, Amanda K Gross challenges us to face the uncomfortable truths of white womanhood in order to dismantle its legacies, all while providing embodied tools to engage with the complexities of our identities, traumas, and harms. White Women, Get Ready is essential reading for those who contend with white womanhood, seek to take action, and understand that the health and well-being for us is not separate from the health and well-being of all. - publisher website.

"Even as anti-racism practices seemed to be gaining momentum, the nation shows signs of falling back into long-standing patterns of racial injustice and inequality. Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash from white colleagues and skepticism from colleagues of color, leading to paralysis. In What Might Be, Susan Sturm explores how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how change agents can move beyond talk to build the architecture of full participation. Sturm argues that although we cannot avoid the contradictions built into efforts to confront racism, we can make them into engines of cross-racial reflection, bridge building, and institutional reimagination, rather than falling into a Groundhog Day-like trap of repeated failures. Drawing on her decades of experience researching and working with institutions to help them become more equitable and inclusive, Sturm identifies three persistent paradoxes inherent in anti-racism work. These are the paradox of racialized power, whereby anti-racism requires white people to lean into and yet step back from exercising power; the paradox of racial salience, which means that effective efforts must explicitly name and address race while also framing their goals in universal terms other than race; and the paradox of racialized institutions, which must drive anti-racism work while simultaneously being the target of it. Sturm shows how people and institutions can cultivate the capacity to straddle these contradictions, enabling those in different racial positions to discover their linked fate and become the catalysts for long-term change" --

"Sarah Lewis deciphers the hugely popular nineteenth-century images that failed to dislodge Americans' faith in the mythical white homeland of the Caucasus. Actual Caucasians little resemble race science's ideals of whiteness, so Americans learned to manipulate their visual regime-and visual media-to suppress evidence of race's incoherence."--;"In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive 'Caucasian' for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it." --