PEGI Project Urges Preservation of Public Federal Data — PEGI Project

"Rapid political events have led to an upheaval in access to data and other information resources produced by the U.S. government, particularly content associated with Executive Orders (EOs) seeking to upend prior federal government activity associated with diversity and inclusion, gender identity, immigration, the climate crisis, public health, consumer safety, and a host of related topics. Within just the past four weeks, federal agencies that are impacted by these EOs have removed access to content or substituted modified content. 

While we at the PEGI Project have been aware of the potential for a crisis like this since the start of our project in 2017, both the pace and extent of the removals and changes have been astonishing to witness. What has also been astonishing (and heartening!) is the willingness of a broad community to join together in quick action to save content, particularly data that cannot be easily captured as part of the End of Term Archive. The Public Environmental Data Partners, a project launched by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), has been working on collecting and preserving hard-to-crawl environmental data for the past couple of months. In the past two weeks, a coalition has formed to launch the Data Rescue Project, which then debuted its Data Rescue Tracker. They also have a helpful (and well-vetted!) list of Resources that can guide individuals and organizations wanting to contribute to this work...."