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EDGI Releases Dataset of Federal Environmental Website Changes Under Trump
Thanks to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) for releasing the Federal Environmental Web Tracker. This tool is a public dataset of searchable records of approximately 1,500 significant changes to federal agency environmental webpages under the Trump administration, these changes were almost always precursors or responses to policy changes. These changes came from a “list of 25,000 federal Web pages related to climate, energy, and the environment, including pages for 20 federal agencies such as EPA, NOAA, and NASA.” Here’s the Tracker’s explanatory page for more context and background.
EDGI continues to do important work in tracking the federal .gov Web domain. EDGI’s work goes hand in hand with the work of the End of Term Web Archive which has harvested the .gov/.mil Web space every 4 years since 2008 and is now deep into its 2020 harvest. And we’re still accepting nominations, so go to the End of Term Nomination Tool hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT) library. Help us collect a snapshot of the federal Web domain!
Today, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) publishes searchable records of approximately 1,500 changes to federal agency environmental webpages under the Trump administration. For four years, EDGI’s website monitoring team has identified and catalogued significant changes to federal websites using their open source monitoring software. EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker makes records of significant changes publicly available.
The information that’s available on federal websites can have important policy implications. As EDGI has often reported over the past four years, changes to the information that’s available on federal websites are almost always precursors or responses to policy changes. Federal websites provide information that the public is likely to access before commenting on a proposed rule to learn about current regulatory efforts, the science underlying a new policy decision, or likely impacts of a proposed rule. The information found (or not found) on a federal website can impact public participation in regulatory processes.
In the weeks after Trump’s election in November 2016, newly-formed EDGI compiled a list of 25,000 federal web pages related to climate, energy, and the environment, including pages for 20 federal agencies such as EPA, NOAA, and NASA. First using proprietary software and then building and using novel open source software, EDGI has compared versions of these web pages weekly since January 2017. This new dataset represents the documented changes that EDGI’s website monitoring team flagged as significant in some way over the past four years.
EDGI’s Federal Environmental Web Tracker gives journalists, academic researchers, and the public data that can be used to provide insight, documentation, and analysis of the information policies and priorities of the Trump administration.
The Federal Environmental Web Tracker will be updated quarterly as EDGI continues to monitor federal environmental websites.
Nominations sought for the U.S. Federal Government Domain End of Term 2020 Web Archive
It’s that time again folks. The End of Term Archive is once again gearing up to harvest the .gov/.mil Web domain. For the End of Term 2020, The Library of Congress, University of North Texas Libraries, Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, and the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) are joining efforts again, this time with new partners Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and the General Services Administration (GSA), to preserve public United States Government websites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2021. This web harvest – like its predecessors in 2008, 2012, and 2016 – is intended to document the federal government’s presence on the World Wide Web during the transition of Presidential administrations and to enhance the existing collections of the partner institutions. This broad comprehensive crawl of the .gov domain will include as many federal .gov sites as we can find, plus federal content in other domains (such as .mil, .com, and social media content) and FTP’d datasets.
Here’s the official announcement asking for YOUR help. Please forward widely!
WE NEED YOUR HELP TO PRESERVE THE .GOV WEB DOMAIN!
How would YOU like to help preserve the United States federal government .gov/.mil Web domain for future generations? But, that’s too huge of a swath of Internet real estate for any one person or organization to preserve, right?!
Wrong! The volunteers working on the End of Term Web Archiving Project are doing just that. BUT WE NEED YOUR HELP!
And that’s where YOU come in. You can help the project immensely by nominating your favorite .gov website/document/dataset, other federal government websites, or governmental social media account with the End of Term Nomination Tool. You can nominate as many sites as you want. Nominate early and often! Win a prize for the most seed nominations!! Tell your friends, family and colleagues to do the same. Help us preserve the .gov domain for posterity, public access, and long-term preservation. Only YOU can help prevent … link rot!
- End of Term 2020 Nomination Tool: Submit URLs here.
- About the End of Term 2020 Project
- End of Term Web Archive (2008, 2012, and 2016)
- Follow us on Twitter @eotarchive
- For more information, contact us at eot-info AT archive DOT org
PBS NewsHour: Internet Archive and the fragility of Internet history
PBS NewsHour recently ran this very good piece on the fragility of Internet information and what the Internet Archive is doing about it. This is a good short piece that succinctly explains why in the digital age lots of copies are necessary to keep information safe. And the corollary to lots of copies is that there needs to be lots of libraries continuing the work of digital collection development.
What’s online doesn’t necessarily last forever. Content on the Internet is revised and deleted all the time. Hyperlinks “rot,” and with them goes history, lost in space. With that in mind, Brewster Kahle set out to develop the Internet Archive, a digital library with the mission of preserving all the information on the World Wide Web, for all who wish to explore. Jeffrey Brown reports.
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