Emergency curation as anticipatory maintenance: Lessons from the 2016/2017 data rescue movement

This article examines how volunteers involved in the Data Rescue movement navigated concerns about the stability and stewardship of federal environmental data following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Drawing on 16 in-depth interviews, the study explores how participants interpreted infrastructural fragility not simply as a technical risk, but as a relational and political concern rooted in shifting institutional commitments. The analysis introduces the concept of anticipatory maintenance to describe how volunteers responded to perceived threats by developing redundant, decentralized strategies for data preservation. Anticipatory maintenance is conceptualized as preventive, future-oriented infrastructural care that translates anticipated disruption into present interventions under uncertainty, in order to explain how volunteers acted as if future loss had already begun, building redundant and decentralized preservation arrangements. Findings highlight the role of particularized trust and systemic distrust in shaping grassroots responses, as well as the limitations encountered in volunteer-driven infrastructures, including challenges related to sustainability, governance, and the affective demands of ongoing maintenance. By foregrounding the interplay of technical, social, and emotional factors, this study offers a critical perspective on data stewardship in times of political uncertainty and underscores the need for collaborative approaches to infrastructural resilience.