Inside the race to archive the US government’s websites
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says David Kaye, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression. “I don’t think any of us know exactly what is happening. What we can see is government websites coming down, databases of essential public interest. The entirety of the USAID website.”
But as government web pages go dark, a collection of organizations are trying to archive as much data and information as possible before it’s gone for good. The hope is to keep a record of what has been lost for scientists and historians to be able to use in the future.
Data archiving is generally considered to be nonpartisan, but the recent actions of the administration have spurred some in the preservation community to stand up.
“I consider the actions of the current administration an assault on the entire scientific enterprise,” says Margaret Hedstrom, professor emerita of information at the University of Michigan.
Various organizations are trying to scrounge up as much data as possible. One of the largest projects is the End of Term Web Archive, a nonpartisan coalition of many organizations that aims to make a copy of all government data at the end of each presidential term. The EoT Archive allows individuals to nominate specific websites or data sets for preservation.
“All we can do is collect what has been published and archive it and make sure it’s publicly accessible for the future,” says James Jacobs, US government information librarian at Stanford University, who is one of the people running the EoT Archive.
Other organizations are taking a specific angle on data collection. For example, the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP) is trying to capture data related to climate science and environmental justice. “We’re trying to track what’s getting taken down,” says Katie Hoeberling, director of policy initiatives at OEDP. “I can’t say with certainty exactly how much of what used to be up is still up, but we’re seeing, especially in the last couple weeks, an accelerating rate of data getting taken down.”
