Call to arms: What government information librarians can do to help save critical federal information from being lost
What is a government information librarian to do during these times when the very public information we base our daily work around is being redacted, cleansed, and deleted? First, make yourself aware of all the work that is already being done (and has been being done since 2008 and before). Our friend and PEGI colleague Lynda Kellam has helpfully created a growing google document of the efforts currently underway to collect and preserve federal government information and data.
Then, what can each of us do, at our libraries, to make sure that government information, once published, is collected, described, preserved, and made freely and publicly available? Here are some things that EVERY government information librarian (regardless of the size of the organization they work for) can do.
1) Send in “unreported” documents to GPO. The executive branch is rife with unreported documents that should be part of the FDLP but have slipped through the ever-growing cracks. We should be absolutely flooding GPO with unreported documents for them to catalog and preserve. It’s quick and easy to do by following the directions on the FDLP website. And the form includes a space to attach a digital file so make sure to do that as well.
EVERY FDLP librarian should agree to track at least one federal agency and submit at least 10 unreported documents to GPO every week. We can’t assure long-term preservation of government information unless we ALL do this. Perhaps GPO or GODORT can help coordinate this? Maybe we can use govdoc-l to announce and update our commitments.
2) Use the Internet Archive’s “save page now” tool to save every .gov page that you visit. IA will crawl and preserve every one of these in the Wayback Machine. It’s quick and easy – and fun! – to copy/paste the url into the “save page now” tool and watch wayback do its work! And it’ll even save that page to your own personal web archive (if you’ve created a free “library card” and are logged in to the site!). You can create your own web archive of important websites. And you can install their free browser extensions to save web pages with a single click. In short, be a librarian! See something save something! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information. GPO, LC, and NARA can’t do it by themselves.
3) Donate to the Internet Archive. (we are NOT IA staff!) It’s time to put our money where our livelihoods are. The Internet Archive does yeoman’s work to preserve the web. They have long put their valuable resources, infrastructure, technology, and staff time towards making sure the End of Term Archive is successful in collecting as much of the .gov/.mil web domain as they can. And they have started a new project called Democracy’s Library to collect the world’s born-digital web based government information and digitize historic government information. So you NEED to pitch in to help their efforts. Skip one or two Starbucks coffees and send them $10 a month. Every little bit helps them be able to continue to do their valuable work.
4) If you work for a library or organization that has an institutional repository and/or digital infrastructure, then advocate with your administration to put that repository and infrastructure toward the common good of hosting local copies of documents and mirroring important data sets.
5) And if your institution has some budgetary and infrastructure wherewithal (and especially if your institution is already a LOCKSS member!), please consider joining the LOCKSS-USDOCS project. The project just had its 16th birthday of distributed preservation of all content on GOVINFO (and FDsys and GPOaccess before that!).
In short, be a librarian! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information.
These are short-term strategies for things that all of us can do RIGHT NOW and we still need to use this current historical moment as an opportunity to develop a long term strategy for building a Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.
Finally: GPO, if you’re listening, please store a copy of EVERY document you catalog and provide a link to your stored copy. Whole websites are being deleted from the web and the only way to assure long-term access is to store a copy. Don’t POINT to a document when you should be COLLECTING every document which is your legal and statutory purview.
The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is
[This post is adapted from our forthcoming book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.]
Today we want to clarify something important about preserving government information. There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age.
When a new president is inaugurated, one expects new policies. The number of changes and the speed of change may vary for different administrations, but we expect that every administration will be different in some ways from its predecessor. After all, that is part of the reason we have elections. Also, information that the government publishes is updated all the time, not just when administrations change. Laws and regulations are added and amended and rescinded, new economic and environmental and census data are collected and published, government recommendations to the public (like the Department of Agriculture’s “food pyramid” guidance) are revised.
Changes in government information are normal in a democracy.
Because change is normal, it is essential to preserve government information – even “non-current” and “out of date” information – in order to document those changes. This is not a new idea, but a long-accepted principle of democracy. Citizens need a record of what a government’s stated values were and when they changed, what actions it took and when it took them, what data it collected and generated at specific points in time, and so forth. It is important to preserve even information that later proves to be inaccurate in order to document what the government knew and when it knew it.
Because published government information is the evidence for a democracy, its preservation is essential.
In the era in which government information was published in paper formats, preservation of that information relied on libraries. The information was distributed to FDLP libraries based on the needs of the communities that those libraries served. Beginning in 1962, Regional FDLs received and retained all the paper publications in the FDLP system. When new information superseded or replaced old information, the old information was not erased or discarded; it was preserved in Regional FDLs and in every FDL whose community valued that older information. In the print era, it was taken for granted that, once government information was released to the public, it would not be withdrawn or altered or lost.1
In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.
Some digital government information is actively preserved by GPO, NARA, and the Library of Congress. Some government-collected data are preserved by law or by tradition. But the laws that allow this are weak and government preservation of government information suffers from large gaps. Non-government projects (notably the Internet Archive and the End-of-Term Archive) use web harvesting to attempt to acquire and store government information, but these projects are, by their nature, incomplete and their long-term guarantees of access are fragile. As a result of all this, the public can no longer assume that any given piece of government information will not be withdrawn or altered or lost.
The early actions of the incoming Trump administration (as well as the actions of the first Trump administration) have brought the vulnerability of digital information to the public’s attention (see our previous post “Federal information scrubbing has begun”) and the public is rightfully worried. That vulnerability is, however, not limited to this administration. Digital government information was being lost before President Trump.
The current crisis of imminent loss of information exists not only because government information is being changed, but because it is being erased. The erasure is possible because of the gaps in the current preservation infrastructure.
The scale of loss and alteration of information under Trump may prove to be unprecedented and certainly requires immediate short-term action. But librarians and archivists and citizens should use this current crisis to demand more than short-term solutions. A new distributed digital preservation infrastructure is needed for digital government information.
James A. Jacobs
James R. Jacobs
- Even when information was withdrawn for some reason, there was a record of the withdrawals. (See this spreadsheet listing withdrawn documents 1981 – 2018, collated from GPO’s no-longer published “Administrative Notes” newsletter.) ↵
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.”
Maryellen Trautman
The great government documents librarian Maryellen Trautman died on November 17, 2024. She was a pioneer and a protector of government documents as a regional depository librarian in Oklahoma and as a government documents librarian at the National Archives and Records Administration. She was one of the founders of the American Library Association Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) in 1972. Among her many other accomplishments, she served on the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing’s Serial Set Committee where she supported the preservation of the Serial Set.
Senators Markey and Hirono and Representative Adams introduce Public Archives Resiliency Act
This is an interesting development. Senators Markey and Hirono and Representative Adams have introduced the Public Archives Resiliency Act — S. 5531 and H.R. 10383. While this legislation will probably go nowhere under a GOP-majority House and Senate, it is significant that legislators are at least starting to think about the need to fund digital preservation efforts for born-digital government information. Efforts to do this work will need policies like this and long-term funding to sustain the efforts of libraries and archives. Please contact your elected officials and ask them to support this vital and necessary legislation!
Washington (December 12, 2024) – Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions Committee and Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Congresswoman Alma Adams, Ph.D. (NC-12) today introduced the Public Archives Resiliency Act, which would authorize grants to promote preservation, climate resilience, adaption, and continuity of vital government records and protect other records of historical or cultural significance. The legislation would provide funding for public archives, libraries, museums, institutions of higher education, or non-profits that protect these valuable records.
As the climate crisis worsens, the need to protect vital government records from damage and destruction is more urgent than ever. Government records are generated through birth, death, marriage, taxes, military service, education, immigration, property ownership and much more. Far too many institutions that manage these records are at risk of environmental damage and lack resources to protect themselves and their communities. When records are destroyed or become inaccessible, it can delay an individual’s ability to access key government benefits and services, as well as result in the loss of irreplaceable cultural artifacts.
Latest Comments