Archivists Work to Identify and Save the Thousands of Datasets Disappearing From Data.gov

Data.gov is the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet.

Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database.

Many of the deletions happened immediately after the inauguration, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine .

The End of Term Web Archive is a project that archives as much as possible from government websites before a new administration takes over.

Data.gov serves as an aggregator of datasets and research across the entire government, meaning it isn’t a single database.

The Environmental Data & Governance Institute published a report in 2019 detailing “How the Trump administration has undermined federal web infrastructures for climate information”.

The Trump administration is deleting government data and research and is making it harder to access.

But determining what is gone, where it went, whether it’s been preserved somewhere, and why it was taken down is a process that is time intensive and going to take a while.

“We will always have an issue with data disappearing,” Phillips said.