The Atlantic donates COVID-19 data-tracking project to UCSF library 

UC San Francisco will house the COVID Tracking Project, a 15-month-long crowdsourced digital archive of daily COVID-19 data compiled by The Atlantic, within the university's permanent library collection, the organizations said July 28. 

The COVID Project ended its daily updates and data compilation March 7, with the project officially coming to a close in May. The Atlantic launched the initiative March 7, 2020, as a volunteer effort to collect and publish daily data on COVID-19 testing and patient outcomes for all 50 states, five U.S. territories and Wasington, D.C. 

About 500 volunteers participated in the project, and the data was cited by major journals and more than 7,700 news stories, according to the July 28 news release. The project is the first "citizen science" effort, when volunteers from the general public contribute, to become part of the UCSF archives, said Polina Ilieva, associate university librarian for collections at UCSF. 

"It documents crowdsourcing science activities and will enable researchers to review the grass roots collaboration as it was happening in real time," she said. 

By adding the COVID Tracking Project to UCSF's permanent library collection, researchers and the public will have access to all its data and information. The archive was created in partnership with the California Digital Library and Dryad, an open-source data infrastructure. 

In an Aug. 2 statement to Becker's, a UCSF spokesperson confirmed that the university is not reviving the data reporting done by the COVID Tracking Project, just adding the work to its archive.

 

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