Who Will Steward Public Data? with Jacqueline Dearborn

Click to join the event on Zoom: lil.law.harvard.edu

In a single generation, humanity has created an unprecedented public data inheritance:

Scientific data. Cultural heritage. Public Records. Publications. Digitized collections Environmental observations. Countless forms of human experience have been captured, connected, and made accessible online.

But public data does not preserve itself.

The infrastructure that allows data to remain accessible, trustworthy, and reusable is increasingly fragile. Ultimately, it depends on the collective commitments of people to carry it forward.

As AI changes how data is discovered, synthesized, and reused, we face emerging questions about trust, provenance, and the relationship between human stewardship and machine-generated information.

Today we are presented with a fundamental question:

What will it take to steward public data at global scale? And who will do it?

The Public Data Project is investigating new models of resilient, globally distributed infrastructure, governance, and mutual-aid arrangements that will enable public data to endure across generations.

We invite you to imagine and build a different future with us: a data ecosystem where stewardship is a shared responsibility, resilience is designed into our systems, and all the world’s communities have the opportunity to contribute to and benefit from humanity’s digital commonwealth.

JJ Dearborn is an Information Studies PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow and Strategic Advisor at Data Futures. She works at the intersection of biodiversity informatics, digital humanities, and global data infrastructure, exploring how AI, semantic technologies, and open standards can turn historical scientific records into connected, reusable data.

Her 15+ year career has spanned libraries, museums, government, and open data initiatives, including the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard Botany Libraries, the Smithsonian, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Peabody Essex Museum, the State of Massachusetts, and the City of Boston. Formerly she served as Secretariat and Data Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library helping to safeguard and advance the interoperability and computational use of more than 64+ million pages of biodiversity literature. As a long-time advocate for the free culture movement, she launched the BHL-Wikimedia Working Group and authored Unifying Biodiversity data to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, JJ now lives in Portugal with her family, where her interests extend to the physical world – exploring how adaptive reuse, biophilic architecture, local food production, and human economies might better coexist with the living world.