NASA and NOAA Data Is Probably Safer Than People Thought | WIRED

"Groups like DataRefuge and EDGI organized quickly—getting a national movement off the ground in a matter of months. They operate from a “triage and prioritize” posture, based on tips they get from government scientists and with an eye toward the moves inside the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Worthy, sure, but long before Trump entered the political picture, open government and open data evangelists had been preserving all kinds of data collected and stored by the government, from crime statistics to unemployment rates to trade deficits.

Some changes, like a redo of the White House website, are normal parts of a presidential transition. The Department of Labor removing its blog posts on how it calculates the unemployment rate, or the Department of Energy changing its language around climate change, are worth keeping an eye on. “The more the merrier,” says James Jacobs, who runs Free Government Information, which tracks and stores government web data. “It’s been really hard for librarians to convince people that preserving the web is important. Google has done a very good job of making people think that once it’s online it’s there forever.”

Together with the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and the Government Publishing Office, Jacobs coordinates the End of Term project, a once a once-every-four-years web harvest of all .gov and .mil sites. He’s also considering completing annual harvests under the Trump administration.

All the extra hands will make lighter work for people like Jacobs, and having lots of copies of things is always better than having none at all. But even as groups of galvanized guerrilla archivists join the fray, breathing life into a cause to which Jacobs has committed his career, he is clear-eyed about the limitations of his line of work.

Archiving is inherently static. It’s a snapshot you take of a moment in time—whether that’s text on a webpage or surface water temperature measurements from the Chukchi Sea in February.

Datasets, on the other hand, are dynamic. And keeping open data pipelines, and the funding that makes them possible, is what scientists and concerned citizens should really be worried about. So while seeding web crawlers and downloading satellite images might make people feel a little less helpless in a time of digital uncertainty, a dataset is only as useful as its last upload. It’s not whether the data disappears—it’s whether people will still be collecting it tomorrow, and next month, and next year that matters."