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As D.C. continues to see spring-like winter this weekend, dozens of people will be cloistered inside, hunched over laptops in an effort to preserve another chunk of federal data sets for posterity.

Organized under the banner of datarescueDC, the two-day event is part of the national Data Refuge Project, which has been working since November to safeguard research that may be vulnerable to an administration skeptical about climate change.

The idea to harvest and save federal data came out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program in Environmental Humanities, where students who were working on a collaborative research project grew deeply concerned in the wake of the election about the vulnerability of environmental data. It was prompted by “the new administration’s failure to believe in science—and belief in an alternative universe,” says Dr. Bethany Wiggin, who directs the program at U Penn. “We know climate change is real. It’s about as uncontroversial as the law of gravity.”

Fearful of mass data deletion, the group came up with a plan to scrape, tag, and save federal data, and began partnering with libraries, environmentalists, civic tech groups, and other organizations to take on the massive project. Since the election, around dozen events have already taken place around the country, and another 20 or so are in the works.

Wiggin said one of her collaborators describes it as a “bucket brigade,” where people are working quickly to make high-quality copies of the data and tag the right metadata to make it usable in the future.

More than 100 people are signed up for this weekend’s archive-a-thon in D.C., which is being held on Georgetown University’s campus—and they don’t have to be experienced coders.

“Anyone can show up if they have a laptop and willingness to sit and be taught how to do some of the rudimentary things,” says Annalisa Dias, who is helping coordinate the D.C. event. There are several tracks for people depending on their degree of technical skills.

Dias herself comes to the project with a very different set of abilities. She describes herself as a theater artist, and is currently working on a climate change-related play through the local playwright collective The Welders.

In addition to actually saving the data, the event also will include a panel on contextualizing and humanizing it. “People don’t know it exists or what the scientists are doing,” Dias says. “There’s a real question about how to translate this work that is so critically important to everyday life and people who aren’t scientists.”

In the days after inauguration, the administration purged references to climate change from the White House website. Officials also moved to remove certain data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, but suspended the plan after an outcry. Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture quietly removed inspection reports and other documents related to animal welfare cases; they now are only accessible via FOIA requests. Wiggin says that while researchers have tracked language changes on the EPA’s pages and other websites, Date Refuge hasn’t documented any cases of data manipulation yet.

And though Data Refuge started as a project simply to save data, it has already begun morphing into something larger. The organizers are talking to partners about growing it into something that can be institutionalized by libraries, which are already in the business of storing and archiving data.

Though there is a federal library depository program that makes government documents available to the public, it is geared at printed materials.

“The existing way that government information has been archived for the historical record … is really based on print,” Wiggin says, noting that there isn’t a corresponding repository for digital material. “With the Trump administration, we see that these long simmering issues about how do we maintain the memory of what the government is doing are [now] quite acute.”

For more information about this weekend’s event, see datarescueDC.