Since President Trump was sworn into office, almost three thousand datasets have disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S. government's repository of open data.
According to 404 Media, online archivist communities discovered since Trump took office on Jan. 21, the number of datasets on Data.gov has decreased to 305,564 from 307,854 datasets. Screenshots of Data.gov's homepage archived in the Wayback Machine show the number of datasets one day before (Jan. 20) and nine days after (Jan. 30) the Trump administration began.
At the direction of the Trump administration, the federal Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies are purging its websites of information and data on a broad array of topics — from adolescent health to LGBTQ+ rights to HIV.
Several webpages from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with references to LGBTQ+ health were no longer available. A page from the HHS Office for Civil Rights outlining the rights of LGBTQ+ people in health care settings was also gone as of Friday. The website of the National Institutes of Health's Office for Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office disappeared. (Most of these pages could still be viewed through the Internet Archive.)
Naseem S. Miller at The Journalist's Resource:
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.
...For the first time in its 70-year history, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the official journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was not published last week as part of a communication pause among federal health agencies. One of the studies slated to appear in the publication was about the risk of bird flu infection among veterinarians who treat cattle, reported Amy Maxman in KFF Health News on January 30. The MMWR, which historically has been published on Thursdays, was not published this week, either.
Tips for preserving websites
Save the websites to the Wayback Machine. The easiest way to do this is by installing the Wayback Machine extension for your browser. The add-ons and extensions are listed on the left-hand panel of the website’s homepage.
To find the missing websites, go to Wayback Machine and type in the website’s URL in the search bar.
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.
You can suggest federal climate and environmental databases to Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
You can suggest databases to The Data Liberation Project, which is run by MuckRock and Big Local News.
Tell science journalist Maggie Koerth what CDC data you've downloaded and whether you've made them publicly available.
