Home » Posts tagged 'EOT'
Tag Archives: EOT
Vicky Reich and David Rosenthal receive CNI Paul Evans Peters Award for LOCKSS
Congratulations to Vicky and David, founders of LOCKSS for receiving the Paul Evans Peters Award! this is a HUGE and justified honor for their lifetimes’ impactful work in libraries and digital preservation. They join other luminaries who have received the Peters Award, among them Tim Berners Lee, Vint Serf, Brewster Kahle, Paul Ginsparg, Daniel Atkins, Christine Borgman, Donald Lindberg, Herbert Van de Sompel, Francine Berman, Paul Courant, and Tony Hey. A veritable who’s who of the internet and libraries!
The Paul Evans Peters Award is a lifetime achievement award that “recognizes the most notable and lasting international achievements related to information technology and the creation and use of information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.” It is jointly awarded by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE.
David and Vicky put up the lecture entitled “Lessons from LOCKSS” that they gave in receiving the Peters Award. It’s a fascinating look at their social AND technical work in developing LOCKSS and the history of digital preservation in libraries. I especially appreciate Vicky’s discussion about the importance of preservation of government information and the spectrum of efforts that have gone into their preservation — including LOCKSS USDOCS, End of Term Archive (EOT), and the Data Rescue Project — and how the concept of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) and its tamper-resistant and long impact on preservation of the information of our democracy is actually embedded in LOCKSS.
Pentagon Culls Social Science Research, deletes 91 funded projects
Today the Pentagon announced that “The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) is scrapping its social science research portfolio as part of a broader effort to ensure fiscal responsibility and prioritize mission-critical activities.”
Examples of cancelled research include:
- The Climate-Food-Urbanization Nexus and the Precursors of Instability in Africa
- Social and Institutional Determinants of Vulnerability and Resilience to Climate Hazards in the African Sahel
- Anticipating Costal Population Mobility: Path to Maladaptation or Sociopolitical Stability
- Comparing Underlying Drivers of South-North Migration in Central America and West Africa
- Democracy Quest (couldn’t find this project in minerva)
- The Language of Parasocial Influence and the Emergence of Extremism
- Weaponized Conspiracies
- Beyond the Clock: Understanding Cross-Cultural Temporal Orientation of Military Officers
- Food Fights: War Narratives and Identity Reproduction in Evolving Conflicts
- Future Fish Wars: Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth
Luckily the End of Term Archive and the Wayback Machine have snapshots of the “Minerva Research Initiative”. Maybe it’s just me, but I would think that funding social science research on global migration patterns, climate change impacts, and social trends is extremely important for long-term planning for the “future battlefield.”
PEGI Project Urges Preservation of Public Federal Data
[Editor’s note: This was originally posted on the PEGI Project blog, of which jrj is a member. In the interest of increasing the reach of PEGI’s important message, we re-post here w permission from PEGI.]
Rapid political events have led to an upheaval in access to data and other information resources produced by the U.S. government, particularly content associated with Executive Orders (EOs) seeking to upend prior federal government activity associated with diversity and inclusion, gender identity, immigration, the climate crisis, public health, consumer safety, and a host of related topics. Within just the past four weeks, federal agencies that are impacted by these EOs have removed access to content or substituted modified content.
While we at the PEGI Project have been aware of the potential for a crisis like this since the start of our project in 2017, both the pace and extent of the removals and changes have been astonishing to witness. What has also been astonishing (and heartening!) is the willingness of a broad community to join together in quick action to save content, particularly data that cannot be easily captured as part of the End of Term Archive. The Public Environmental Data Partners, a project launched by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), has been working on collecting and preserving hard-to-crawl environmental data for the past couple of months. In the past two weeks, a coalition has formed to launch the Data Rescue Project, which then debuted its Data Rescue Tracker. They also have a helpful (and well-vetted!) list of Resources that can guide individuals and organizations wanting to contribute to this work.
There is still an urgent need to act right now, particularly as court challenges are being filed to the EOs, which have led to some pauses in content removal or modification. See the Data Rescue Project’s list of Current Efforts or connect with them directly if you are able to help. And keep an eye on updates from Free Government Information for more on how access to government information is changing and what you can do to help. Recent posts of particular interest include:
The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is
Times of crisis and change bring many challenges, and each of us has an opportunity to decide how our priorities, skills, and bandwidth guide us in acting. There are many activities out there, and this Data Rescue Need to Know Bluesky starter pack can connect you with them. We are here to help you navigate what’s happening. Reach out to us at info AT pegiproject DOT org.
Federal information scrubbing has begun. Please support the End of Term Archive and Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI)
It seems that the scrubbing of public information and communication from Federal government websites has begun. But along with erasing information that the new administration does not like (mostly centered on climate change and the environment, science, health, DEI, civil rights, immigration, and the like), they have also signed a raft of executive orders overturning policies from the previous administration (here’s a track of all the executive orders signed in recent days) and purged up to 18 Inspector generals (IGs) from across the federal government. IG’s are meant to be independent government watchdogs who conduct investigations and audits into malfeasance, fraud, waste or abuse by government agencies and its personnel. So it seems pretty clear that the new administration wants to a) hide or delete information it doesn’t agree with; and b) make sure there are no watchdogs in place within agencies who could report on fraud, waste, or abuse by the new personnel being put in place by president Trump.
Luckily, there are librarians and NGO watchdog groups on the case. Ben Amata, Government Information Librarian at Sacramento State University, has started to track the issue in his new libguide Government Information: Eliminated, Suspended, Etc. His contact is on the libguide so please send him any news articles about the disappearance of federal information.
Our friends at the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) are busy archiving public environmental data as they did in 2016 during the first Trump administration.
The End of Term Archive is once again harvesting and preserving the .gov/.mil web domain as it has done since 2008 regardless of each president’s political party.
And all kinds of non-profit organizations like the umbrella watchdog group Democracy2025 are gearing up to “analyze Trump-Vance administration actions, support legal challenges, and provide resources for the pro-democracy community.”
Here are but a few examples of news items I’ve seen in the last few days. Feel free to leave us a comment pointing to other examples.
Scope of the communications hold on federal health agencies expands. Chris Dall, January 23, 2025. Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy CIDRAP, University of Minnesota.
The memo, sent to heads of operating divisions on January 21, orders recipients to “Refrain from publicly issuing any documents (e.g., regulation, guidance, notice, grant announcement) or communication (e.g., social media, websites, press releases, and communication using listservs) until it has been reviewed and approved by a presidential appointee,” through February 1.
The memo also bars participation in any public speaking engagements and sending documents intended for publication in the Office of the Federal Register.
Trump’s anti-DEI order yanks air force videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female pilots. Reuters (25 Jan 2025)
“…Donald Trump’s order halting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has led the US air force to suspend course instruction on a documentary about the first Black airmen in the US military, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, a US official said on Saturday.
Another video about civilian female pilots trained by the US military during the second world war, known as Women Airforce Service Pilots, or Wasps, was also pulled, the official said…”
Trump pardoned the January 6 convicts. Now his DOJ is wiping evidence of rioters’ crimes from the internet. Donie O’Sullivan and Katelyn Polantz, CNN (January 26, 2025)
“As President Donald Trump this week sought to rewrite the history of his supporters’ attack on the US Capitol, a database detailing the vast array of criminal charges and successful convictions of January 6 rioters was removed from the Department of Justice’s website.
The searchable database served as an easily accessible repository of all January 6, 2021, cases prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
…Parts of the database were still accessible Sunday through the Internet Archive.
…The FBI — representing another leg of the Justice Department — also took offline its compendium of wanted Capitol rioters. Some of those individuals were fugitives or rioters who hadn’t been identified, and the FBI had posted images and other information of the suspects it was still seeking.
Thousands of pages that were part of the database now appear to be inaccessible. Details of January 6 cases are still accessible on the DOJ’s website in the form of press releases about charges and convictions. They are also still available through court records and services such as Pacer.”
Good Forbes piece on the End of Term crawl
Check out this recent piece in Forbes about the End of Term project (eotarchive.org). And if you’re so moved to help out, you can nominate any federal government url through our handy nomination tool. There’s still time to help us save democracy’s information!
Meet The Citizens Racing To Save Government Websites From Vanishing. Leslie Katz, Forbes, Oct 23, 2024
…With the Nov. 5 election just a week away, they’re harvesting vast amounts of government data before the White House welcomes new residents or former ones in January. The information will live on in the End of Term Web Archive, a giant repository of federal government websites preserved for the historical record as one administrative term ends and a new one begins. Librarians, archivists and technologists across the country join forces every four years to donate time, effort and resources to what they dub the end-of-term crawl, with the resulting datasets available to the public for free…
“Citizens have a right to access information about what their government is doing in their name,” says James Jacobs, a government information librarian at Stanford University, an End of Term Web Archive project partner. “That’s why libraries have long collected these materials to make sure they are organized, preserved and easily accessible for the long term.”
Latest Comments