Government Information Data Rescue

A guide linking to trusted repositories that have rescued U.S. government data

Government Data Rescue: Questions? Need help finding data?

If you have questions, need help finding data, or need help archiving data you have, please reach out to lib-gov-data-rescue@virginia.edu.

Data Rescue Project

Data Rescue Project
The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Their goal is to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. We want to know what is happening in the community so that we can coordinate focus. Efforts include: data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets.

Data Rescue Tracker

The Data Rescue Tracker is a catalog of existing public data rescue efforts. The Data Rescue Tracker aims to provide a consolidated overview of who is backing up which dataset from which government websites. The view below shows you which datasets have already been backed up, and where to find the content.

For more information, visit the full Data Rescue Tracker: https://www.datarescueproject.org/data-rescue-tracker/ hosted by the Data Rescue Project.

Archiving Organizations

Data Lumos (ICPSR)
DataLumos is an ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources. ICPSR has a long commitment to safekeeping and disseminating US government and other social science data. DataLumos accepts deposits of public data resources from the community and recommendations of public data resources that ICPSR itself might add to DataLumos.
Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab
The Innovation Lab has created a data vault to download, sign as authentic, and make available copies of public government data that is most valuable to researchers, scholars, civil society and the public at large across every field. They have collected major portions of the datasets tracked by data.gov, federal Github repositories, and PubMed.
IPUMS
IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services available free of charge.
Public Environmental Data Project
A volunteer coalition of several environmental, justice, and policy organizations, researchers across several universities, archivists, and students who rely on federal datasets and tools to support critical research, advocacy, policy, and litigation work.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Internet Archive's US Government Documents
This Internet Archive collection contains digital versions of United States Government documents as well as other government documents.
End of Term Web Archive
The End of Term Web Archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. They are currently working on 2024.

Advocacy Organizations

COPAFS: Council of Professional Associations of Federal Statistics
The Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) is devoted to educational activities and to preserving the public good represented by federal statistical collections.
DCN: Data Curation Network
The Data Curation Network (DCN) is a membership organization of institutional and non-profit data repositories whose vision is to advance open research by making data more ethical, reusable, and understandable. Our mission is to empower researchers to publish high quality data in an ethical and FAIR way, collaboratively advance the art and science of data curation by creating, adopting, and openly sharing best practices, and supporting thoughtful, innovative, and inclusive data curation training and professional development opportunities.

Based at the University of Minnesota, the DCN also facilitates a shared-curation workflow, in which datasets from one institution are matched with an expert at a different member institution.
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaborative and network of diverse professionals promoting evidence-based policy-making and public interest science that advances the Environmental Right to Know (ERTK). They have been archiving US federal environmental data.
IASSIST: International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology
IASSIST (International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology) is an international organization of professionals working with information technology and data services to support research and teaching. IASSIST was founded in 1974. We want to leverage our unique expertise in the social sciences to help benefit all data professionals and support open science.

Our members work in information technology, libraries, data services, research & higher education, government, non-profit and private research sector to discover data, curate it, make it available, and keep it available. We work together to advocate for responsible data management and use, to build a broader community surrounding research data, and encourage the development of data professionals.
RDAP: Research Data Acess and Preservation Association
RDAP (Research Data Access & Preservation) supports an engaged community of information professionals committed to creating, maintaining, advancing, and teaching best practices for research data, access, and preservation.

The RDAP community brings together a variety of individuals, including data managers and curators, librarians, archivists, researchers, educators, students, technologists, and data scientists from academic institutions, data centers, funding agencies, and industry who represent a wide range of STEM disciplines, social sciences, and humanities.
Silencing Science Tracker
The Silencing Science Tracker is a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. It tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election.