Researchers rush to preserve government health data
peter.suber's bookmarks 2025-02-02
Summary:
"Journalists have long relied on federal health data for their reporting, but several government websites have been taken down in the past week. We include several tips that they can use to help researchers preserve the data....
A group of researchers and students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is gathered today for a data preservation marathon, scraping and downloading data related to health equity from U.S. government agency websites before they disappear. Their goal is to make the downloaded data publicly available through repositories such as the Harvard Dataverse....
Tips for preserving websites
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To find the missing websites, go to Wayback Machine and type in the website’s URL in the search bar.
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If you’re concerned that certain websites or web pages may be removed, you can suggest federal websites and content that end in .gov, .mil and .com to the End of Term Web Archive.
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You can suggest federal climate and environmental databases to Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
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You can suggest databases to The Data Liberation Project, which is run by MuckRock and Big Local News.
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Tell science journalist Maggie Koerth what CDC data you've downloaded and whether you've made them publicly available...."