Web archivists scrambling to save US public data from deletion

As President Donald Trump's administration purges public records since storming back to power, experts and volunteers are preserving thousands of web pages and government sites devoted to climate change, health or LGBTQ rights and other issues.

Resources on AIDS prevention and care, weather records, references to ethnic or gender minorities: numerous databases were destroyed or modified after Trump signed an executive order in January declaring diversity, equality and inclusion programs and policies within the federal governmentto be illegal.

More than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site were taken down and more than 1,000 from the Justice Department's website, Paul Schroeder, president of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, told AFP.


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Some websites have disappeared altogether, such as that of the US development agency USAID, which has been effectively shuttered as Trump slashes US aid to poor countries.

And the National Children's Health Survey page displays a "404 error" message.

Federal agencies must now avoid hundreds of words such as "woman," "disability," "racism", "climate crisis" and "pollution" in their communications, the New York Times reported.

"The focus has been on removing language related to environmental (or) climate justice on websites, as well as removing data and tools related to environmental (or) climate justice," Eric Nost, a geographer at Canada's University of Guelph and member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) told AFP.

"This Trump administration moved more quickly and with a greater scope than the previous Trump administration," he said.

EDGI, a consortium of academics and volunteers, began safeguarding public climate and environmental data after Trump's first election in 2016.

Among the tools used are the WayBack Machine from the non-profit Internet Archive, or Perma.cc, developed by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School.

These systems, which long predate Trump's election, help "courts and law journals preserve the web pages they cite to," said Jack Cushman, director of the Library Innovation Lab.

Long used by journalists, researchers and NGOs, web archiving enables a page to be preserved, even if it were to disappear from the internet or be modified later.

This data is then stored on servers in a large digital library, allowing anyone to consult it freely.

Volunteer work

Archiving initiatives have multiplied, expanded and coordinated since Trump's return to the White House.

The Data Rescue Project (DRP) brought together several organisations to save as much data as possible.

"We were concerned about data being deleted. We wanted to try to see what we could do to rescue them," Lynda Kellam, a university librarian and DRP organizer, told AFP.

She first launched the project as an online Google doc in February -- a simple word-processing tool listing downloaded PDF files, original dataset titles and archived links.

It is now maintained by volunteers "who are working after work" to keep it running, said Kellam.

"We are all volunteers, even myself. We have other jobs so that has been challenging," Kellam added.

The data collection work, largely carried out by associations and university libraries, is threatened by a lack of resources.

"Funding is the key issue... as the library and archives community rushes to take on a larger preservation challenges than ever before," Cushman said.

"We need to fund coordinators for the ongoing effort, new tools, and new homes for the data."

Harvard is also battling the ire of the Trump administration, which has cut federal grants to the prestigious university and threatened its tax-exempt status after it refused to comply with the president's demands to accept government oversight.

"Data is the modern lighthouse, helping us plan our lives: it shows where we are so we can plan where we're going," Cushman said.

"Businesses, individuals, and governments will suffer greatly from any failure to collect and share reliable data on weather and climate, health, justice, housing, employment, and so on."