But The One In Front Of The Gun Lives Forever

Email for a Research Librarian: To find a research librarian try running an internet search like: “[College Name] Library Staff Directory” and see who may be a good fit.

Subject: Data.world public archive private purchase and deletion

Hi [Research Librarian or Data Preservation Specialist],

I recently ran into news that data.world has been purchased by ServiceNow, and that ServiceNow is ending public access to these archives July 11th. This is a very large public data archive that I personally used in my undergraduate work several years ago. I don't know much about digital preservation, or how it works at [College Name], but I thought it might be worthwhile to try reaching out.

I wanted to let someone in Libraries know in case current [College Name] students are using data in this archive for their research and need to be notified to save the data elsewhere, and to see if there is anything that [College Name] can do to help with greater preservation efforts.

The archive can be accessed here for now. A login is required, but it is free to set up.

https://data.world/_all/w/datasets

Here is a screenshot with the announcement of the closure of the site. Site users were not notified that access will be ending and would have to be looking at the page regularly to know that access will be terminated.

Please let anyone know who may need to use the site (or who would be interested in trying to preserve it).

Thanks,

[Your Name]

[Your Job/College Affiliation]

[Your Contact Information]

If you know a current department or school within a college that is using data.world archives, this is a template that I am using to contact department chairs or assistant/associate deans of research within specific schools.

Subject: Loss of public data.world access 7/11/26

Hi [Dr. Last Name]

I recently learned that the public data archive data.world has been purchased by ServiceNow and that they are closing public access 7/11/26. [Sentence about how the data is or was used by the department/school you are contacting].

I wanted to make sure this was on your radar in case any students are doing research with this data and need to act quickly to retrieve the data sources they need for their work, similarly for faculty using this data in their research or teaching.

The archive can be accessed here for now. A login is required, but it is free to set up.

https://data.world/_all/w/datasets

Here is a screenshot with the announcement of the closure of the site. Site users were not notified that access will be ending and would have to be looking at the page regularly to know that access will be terminated.

Please let anyone know who may need to use the site (or who would be interested in trying to preserve it).

Thanks,

[Your Name]

[Your Job/College Affiliation]

“I told you that I won’t have an unwilling man on my ship,” Yao said. “I meant it, Director.”

“I know. You won’t have any unwilling crewmembers,” Stratt said. Or, she hoped he wouldn’t; Dr. Grace would wake up assuming he had volunteered to go because he wouldn’t remember otherwise. And if he did remember… well. All three of them would be too far away to do anything about it. They could all curse her from Tau Ceti. She was sure that neither Yao nor Grace would refuse to do what they were sent to do, once they were there, once there was nothing else to be done. They were both good people. They would do their job.

(And in that moment, she hated Ryland Grace, for putting her in this position, for giving her no other viable option than to lie. Another friend betrayed, another person she cared about who would die hating her for doing what had to be done to save the world.)

“He seemed confident about his choice,” Yao said. “What made him change his mind?”

“We just surprised him, and he was afraid, which was understandable to feel right then. He needed time alone to think and…” She didn’t know the words she needed. She was thinking too hard about what to say. She switched to English, and had a vague sense that she’d lost. “He needed time to come to terms with the reality of it. To break down where no one was looking. It was understandable, that he would react so badly in the moment but calm down after. That’s what he does. And when I approached him again he was crying but he said, ‘Fine. I’ll go. Just put me under before I can change my mind.’ And I took him at his word. I did not want him changing his mind.”

It was not the narrative she’d told the assembled team, the launch crew. It was not the narrative she would tell the media. She would tell them that Dr. Ryland Grace was a hero, that despite being afraid he chose to be brave, that he saw that the world needed him and he rose to meet that need. Eva Stratt did not enjoy being a liar, but there were lots of things she did not enjoy, and she’d had to do a great many of them to make sure Project Hail Mary had any chance of success at all.

But she had a backup narrative, for those who knew Dr. Grace well enough to know that he was not heroic and not brave and was unlikely to willingly step up for the good of the world. Yao knew Grace. Yao got the story that sounded like something Grace would actually say.

(The thing Stratt had been privately, desperately hoping he’d say.)

(She hated him for saying no instead. Hated him for running. Hated herself for expecting anything else from him, and for knowing what she had to do. Hated the world for requiring this of either of them. It felt like some cosmic punishment for having the audacity to let herself care, for daring to hope that she’d be allowed any friends to weather the storm with.)

If Yao knew she was lying, he didn’t challenge her further. Maybe he really did believe her. Maybe he had concluded that making it obvious he didn’t would get him pinned down like an uncooperative dog and injected with a sedative so he couldn’t object, because she would not stop the launch for anything as petty as moral opposition to how they got Grace on the ship. (She wouldn’t do that. Yao still had a backup. If he truly refused on the grounds that he didn’t believe Grace volunteered, she’d lie again, announce that he had some late-detected medical concern that made the coma too high a risk, and send Mikhail Borovkov instead. He had to know that. If for no other reason than that forcing one unwilling astronaut onto the ship was difficult enough, so forcing two would make the mission far more risky and would make keeping the secret from the world exponentially more difficult, especially as that would mean also requiring Ilyukhina to go under early so that no questions would be asked about why two of the astronauts on the mission were already in their comas before launch, which would mean coming up with an explanation Ilyukhina would believe let alone the rest of the world—)

(Decision trees had branched out in her mind during those three hours, strangling her with if-thens and alternate possibilities, and none of them ended well.)

(She hated Ryland Grace. Why wasn’t the fate of the entire human race enough for him? Did he think they were all here sacrificing their lives and their freedom and their souls for the hell of it? Did he think that she or Yao or Ilyukhina or DuBois or anybody else had wanted to do this any more than he did? Did he think he was somehow unique in being afraid? Did none of this fucking matter to him after all?)

“I see,” was what Yao finally said. Then, “I’m sorry it had to come to this. It wasn’t what any of us wanted.”

“It wasn’t,” Stratt agreed. “And I’m sorry too.” And oh, it felt so, so unfair that Yao was allowing her the space to say something true.

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