Federal Data & Website Preservation

The Library’s Finding Data & Statistics and Government Information research guides have been updated with resources for alternative repositories and backup locations for U.S. federal datasets and websites that have been removed or altered since the 2025 presidential inauguration.

Resources include the Data Rescue Project, a clearinghouse for tracking backup locations for data that has been deleted or vulnerable to removal, Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab’s mirror of data.gov, Internet Archive records, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) and more. Many of these initiatives are actively seeking dataset recommendations for long-term preservation. 

Support

For questions or to discuss more, please email, 

• Elizabeth Salmon, Social Science Librarian, about locating data or the above resources
• DiSSCo (Digital Scholarship Services Collaboration) about data preservation and access
• Neil Curri, Academic Computing Consultant for GIS, about GIS data, ArcGIS/ ESRI, and Census data

Additional information

• Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion (BBC) Apr 23, 2025
• The data hoarders resisting Trump’s purge: Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE? (New Yorker) Mar 14, 2025
• Some federal health websites restored, others still down, after data purge (NPR) Feb 6, 2025
• Thousands of U.S. government web pages have been taken down since Friday (NY Times) Feb 2, 2025