Higher education institutions will play a central role in all aspects of the development of end-to-end data systems. They will contribute to the evolution of the fundamental data system elements, provide the initial user base that will test these system elements, and they will be among the more important data providers contributing data to the system. There is, however, one related area in which colleges and universities have taken a step backward. In the past, researchers often published their data, in paper form, as technical memoranda or some equivalent, and these reports were archived in the institutional library. With the advent of the Web, such technical reports have all but disappeared, with researchers publishing their data on personal Web sites; thus, the institutional commitment to a long-term archive of the data is waning. This is a trend that must be reversed; colleges and universities must provide a mechanism for researchers to publish their data electronically for permanent archival in the institutional library. Otherwise, a significant fraction of the data will be lost forever.