Data Rescue 2.0

After a post-election frenzy to save government data, open-access advocates are refocusing their energies toward a long-term strategy. 

- Michelle Z. Donahue

In late May of this year, exactly five months from the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States, a group of people concerned with the new administration’s stance toward science and climate change marked its own special anniversary.

Not far from the campus of the University of North Texas, on the plains north of Dallas, several dozen individuals met up at Data Rescue Denton to identify and download copies of federal climate and environmental datasets. These hackathon-style gatherings received a great deal of attention in the days immediately preceding the inauguration; Denton was the 50th such event since January 2017.

Organizing initially out of concern that the new administration might erase or obscure climate and other environmental data, data rescuers’ worst fears seemed to be coming true when one of the Trump White House’s first actions was to delete climate-change pages from its website. Then the U.S. Department of Agriculture, after removing animal-welfare inspection reports from its website, responded to a National Geographic Freedom of Information Act request with 1,771 pages of entirely redacted material.

Anyone can access the more than 153,000 federal datasets through the central government open-data portal at data.gov. But that’s only a fraction of the data that exist in the nebula of the government bureaucracy, never mind the even smaller fraction that is on a server.

“Somewhere around 20 percent of government info is web-accessible,” said Jim Jacobs, the Federal Government Information Librarian at Stanford University Library. “That’s a fairly large chunk of stuff that’s not available. Though agencies have their own wikis and content management systems, the only time you find out about some of it is if someone FOIAs it.”