Thank you to our colleagues from the Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts College Libraries group for their thoughtful collaboration on this guide.
After January 20, 2025, federal data, webpages, and other previously accessible sources of government information normally available to researchers and the public began to disappear in order to comply with executive orders. This is an evolving situation.
To learn more about missing or altered federal data:
The Journalists Resource is an overview of the current situation from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School.
Environmental Data & Governance Initiative is an advocacy group for access to environmental data.
The National Security Archive at GWU article "Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information from Government Websites."
Data Rescue Project maintains a list of crowd-sourced efforts and resources to preserve and maintain accessibility to data. This is a growing google doc and they appreciate suggestions from other researchers. Follow them on BlueSky (the X/Twitter alternative) handle: bsky.app/profile/datarescueproject.org
End of Term Archive: Is a project by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to preserve and make available government web sites prior to presidential inaugurations
The GovWayback Archive: How it works: Take any .gov URL and add wayback.com right after .gov,
and you'll be redirected to the Wayback Machine's archived version of the page.
The Harvard Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library is currently preserving datasets from data.gov, PubMed, and others.
The Data Liberation Project proposes to "liberate datasets and databases from the government." Use this form to make suggestions.
The Health Data Preservation Project is a group of news non-profits and journalists working to conserve health data and information that was previously available on government web sites.
IPUMS: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series is committed to preserving and making accessible census and survey data from around the world.