As important research data–including those related to key topics including climate change and cancer treatments, and funded by public money–is disappearing from federal government websites, there are many efforts underway to save it. Individuals, academic libraries, data organizations, and Web repositories are collecting government datasets and working to maintain the accessibility of the data to the public.
The Data Rescue Project (DRP) is a growing resource for learning about different data rescue projects for public government data and is the result of coordination among data organizations including IASSIST and RDAP. Their amazing Data Rescue Tracker provides information on specific government datasets, including the responsible federal agency, original URL, rescue status, and the filetype, maintaining organization, and download location of the rescued data.
The DRP Web site includes a page that lists a number of academic library guides on how to find and preserve government data. The University of Minnesota Libraries guide includes links to a number of projects attempting to track changes to the availability of government information, including the Columbia Law School and Columbia Climate School projects Silencing Science Tracker and Climate Deregulation Tracker.
Since 2008, the Internet Archive (IA) has worked with partner organizations to create an End of Term Web Archive by crawling federal government websites–including some datasets–in the .gov, .mil, and other domains. The archives are created at the end of each presidential administration. You can search the 2024 End of Term Web Archive in IA’s Wayback Machine.
To stay informed about these efforts and to get involved, you can sign up for the Data Rescue Project email list.