Newest data tracking effort: dataindex.us
For those looking to keep abreast on all of the changes and deletions to federal government information and data, now there’s dataindex.us. DataIndex is a new collaborative project dedicated to monitoring the federal data infrastructure including dataset availability, new releases, and both planned and unplanned changes to data collections. The platform is developing tools to help policymakers, advocates, journalists, and data users stay on top of key shifts in federal data. This incredible resource was designed, funded and ideated upon by many of our close friends and allies in the space.
Here’s what America’s Data Index offers:
- Trackers that identify proposed changes to federal surveys and forms, including opportunities for public comment.
- Monitoring of key data collections, including when data is removed or changed.
- A newsletter with weekly posts analyzing what data is affected by Executive Orders, highlighting current opportunities for public comment, and offering insights on a range of data-related issues.
Check it out, bookmark it, and don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter!
New: The Federal Data Forum
The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has launched the Federal Data Forum — an online community of hundreds of public data stakeholders (groups and individuals) interested in protecting the federal data infrastructure.
PRB is a nonpartisan organization that advocates for the democratization of data.
Members of the forum can share news, resources, and data advocacy strategies related to the Federal Statistical System. The Forum is designed to provide a safe and centralized space for sharing information about the latest threats to federal data, what to do when data are no longer available, and how organizations and individuals can collaborate to protect public data. PRB hopes to bring together researchers, policymakers, advocates, and concerned citizens.
You can sign up at federaldataforum.prb.org
Trump administration shut down more than 100 climate studies
Librarians and archivists are doing all that they can to collect and curate already-published web-based government information and data before it is taken offline. However, this administration’s anti-science policies and executive orders will have long-lasting negative impacts in the United States and around the world going forward and for many years to come as scientific grants from across the federal government are cut, rescinded, and no longer funded.
Lost in much of the media coverage these days is the fact that US agencies have long supported the backbone of global sciences, humanitarian, and health data infrastructures. Case in point: USAID data sets are critical to the work of the United Nations and one can find (or *could* find until USAID was shut down) USAID data in places like the UN’s data.un.org open data portal. This goes for data and information from CDC, NIH, NSF, NOAA, EPA, and other scientific agencies.
The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies. James Temple. Technology Review (June 2, 2025)
The Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change amid a widening campaign to slash federal funding for scientists and institutions studying the rising risks of a warming world.
The move will cut off what’s likely to amount to tens of millions of dollars for studies that were previously approved and, in most cases, already in the works.
Affected projects include efforts to develop cleaner fuels, measure methane emissions, improve understanding of how heat waves and sea-level rise disproportionately harm marginalized groups, and help communities transition to sustainable energy, according to an MIT Technology Review review of a GrantWatch database — a volunteer-led effort to track federal cuts to research— and a list of terminated grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) itself.
Tracking govinfo project logging removed or modified federal publications and websites
There is a long tradition in the govinfo librarian world of assuring access and longevity of published government information. From 1981 until 1998, Anne Heanue and the fine folks at the Washington Office of the American Library Association (ALA) published an amazing series called Less Access to Less Information by and about the U.S. Government, a chronology of efforts to restrict and privatize government information. FGI has long tracked on this issue as well.
And now in the time of the 2nd Trump administration and its well-known attack on federal agencies and the public information and data that they publish, a new and extremely valuable project has started. The Tracking Removed and Modified Government Information & Resources Project (aka Tracking Gov Info Project) is looking to compile a comprehensive list of government websites, documents, articles, reports, etc. that have been removed or modified by the current administration. Anyone who encounters a missing resource can enter it using their submission form. Entries can be viewed publicly on the spreadsheet. There are already 82 instances posted!
The project is currently led by government information and social science librarians from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater!).
I’m really glad to see efforts like TGP coming online in this really tenuous time for the public domain.
New from FreeGovInfo Press: “Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future”
Jim Jacobs and I are pleased to announce the publication of our book Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future. It is available as a free PDF, a free ePub, and a print-book ($20) at https://freegovinfo.info/pgi.
In this book, we examine how preservation practices of the past affect the preservation of digitally published federal government information today, we analyze data to characterize the current scale of government publishing and the gaps in preservation, and we look to the future by charting a path to a distributed Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.
We address technical issues without unnecessarily technical jargon. The book is designed to be used by LIS students, front-line librarians and archivists, managers of libraries and archives, government workers who publish and preserve government information, and policy makers who design laws and regulations that affect the production, dissemination and preservation of government information.
Early praise for Preserving Government Information:
If you want to understand the breadth of published government information, this book explains it. If you would like a deeper understanding about why it is important to preserve government information, this book convinces you. If you’re considering helping to preserve government information, this book will motivate you and show you the ways. If you’re working to preserve government information, this book will help you become more effective. Written by two of the nation’s leading and well-respected government documents experts, this thorough work is uncannily timely. Preserve Government information, preserve the record of government actions.
–David Rosenthal and Victoria Reich, co-founders, LOCKSS
Our times practically scream for this crucial book from Jacobs and Jacobs. Long respected for their expertise with data, government information, and libraries, the authors apply their considerable skills toward the conundrum of preserving digital government information before we watch it disappear. In artfully critiquing many projects, studies, ad hoc groups, and agencies that have gone before, the authors provide a non-technical introduction to what is needed right away: an open digital preservation infrastructure.
Jacobs and Jacobs offer a well-researched distillation of our collective wisdom and our digital and tangible pasts, a mind-opening theoretical review, and thank goodness, a path forward. Their careful, well researched, always critical insights will find an eager readership. Concluding with a principled call to arms, Preserving Government Information stands to become a core reading in many professional settings and in library/information studies.
–Cass Hartnett, U.S. Documents Librarian, University of Washington
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