Various Institutions, Including Harvard, Preserve Data as Trump's Administration Erases Content from Federal Website Pages
Going forward, organizations are taking proactive measures to safeguard vital data as the Trump administration scrambles to erase or limit access to numerous federal webpages. Here's a rundown of the strategies being employed:
- End of Term Archive (EOT Archive)
- A collective mission, spearheaded by institutions like the Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, Common Crawl Foundation, University of North Texas Libraries, and Webrecorder, aims to gather and save U.S. government websites at the end of presidential transitions. For the 2025 transition, they've archived more than 500 terabytes of data from the .gov domain.
- Wayback Machine
- The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine serves a significant role in capturing federal websites prior to their demise. Researchers can then access archived versions of deleted pages, such as the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey site and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
- Volunteer Coalitions and Researchers
- Groups like the Public Environment Data Project, led by Jonathan Gilmour, are diligently scraping and downloading data from threatened federal websites. The goal is to make the downloaded data publicly available through repositories like Harvard Dataverse.
- Journalist and Researcher Initiatives
- Journalists and researchers are backing up data used for ongoing projects and storing it in secure repositories. For instance, the Association of Healthcare Journalists suggests that journalists should store backups of visible data on federal health websites.
- Community Efforts
- Community groups and individual citizens are contributing to the preservation effort by downloading essential information or datasets and saving them in appropriate repositories. Mark Phillips, a librarian at the University of North Texas Libraries, urges individuals to utilize the Internet Archive's tool to capture web pages right away and store them in the Wayback Machine.
- Collaborative Data Preservation
- Researchers from various universities and organizations are collaborating to pinpoint critical databases and archive them. For instance, a team has identified 57 high-priority databases, with 37 of them successfully archived.
As these initiatives gain momentum, they're working tirelessly to reduce the impact of the Trump administration's data elimination efforts and ensure that vital public health and scientific information stays accessible for future research and public consumption.
- The Mitchell Technology Review, in an article, highlighted the efforts of various organizations, including Harvard University, to preserve data from government webpages like data.gov, in response to the Trump administration's actions.
- During the transition period, the U.S. government under the Trump administration attempted to limit access to numerous federal webpages, prompting Harvard University to collaborate with others to download and archive data from these webpages.
- In an effort to counteract the Trump administration's actions, researchers from Harvard University and other institutions are making these archived data available on platforms such as the MIT Technology Review and data.gov.
