Financial crises are thankfully infrequent. That means looking for patterns requires lots and lots of data. Two top macroeconomists, Ken Rogoff from Harvard and Carmen Reinhart from the University of Maryland, have been collecting financial crisis records covering many variables in many countries and going back many years. Their main finding is that, even though people always like to say, that this time is different, financial crises do follow patterns. Having heard about this work, scholars from around the world have contacted Reinhart and Rogoff about gaining access to their data and contributing even more data to expand the historical record. Rather than keeping this wealth of information to themselves, they plan to create a living and open-access database that researchers and the interested public can put to good use and help to expand. Launching this "International Financial Crisis Database" not only represents a great service to the field, it is also consistent with the Sloan Foundation's tradition of facilitating cooperation by scholars from around the world in compiling comprehensive, high quality, and open access research tools.