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New App Will Aid Data Rescue

A custom-built app will soon make it easy for anyone check government URLs to determine if they have been archived outside of government control and, if not, submit them for archiving.

The article in Quartz also reports on “data rescue events,” all-day archiving marathons, that have been held in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Michigan. Scientists, programmers, professors and digital librarians are meeting to “save federal data sets they thought could be altered or disappear all together under the administration of US president Donald Trump.” Jerome Whittington, a professor at NYU who organized one data rescue event, said about data on air and water pollution, contaminated soil, toxic spills, and the violation of rules against dumping harmful waste, “If you don’t have the data, you’ll be told your problem doesn’t exist. It is in a way a struggle over what we consider reality.”

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