So awesome to hear about all of the wonderful work that is being done to ensure that government sites and data are preserved and remain available. Strength in numbers!
#GovInfoDaySpring2025

Despite these challenges, it has been heartening to see the amount of effort and support going into this important work. Thank you again for all your engagement and attention. If you'd like to join the conversation, reach out to us on our website www.pegiproject.org

Our (and by “our” we mean everyone working on this problem) work in the US is challenging at the moment. It’s a constantly changing situation, and we don't have a good centralized coordination mechanism for these efforts.

A positive is that we have some infrastructure in place to meet this challenge. Agencies had started considering the role of FAIR for their data, which means better documentation and metadata for online files, all of which has been good for #DataRescue efforts.

In addition to coordinating volunteers and posting resources, they've already produced a rescue tracking tool: www.datarescueproject.org/data-rescue-...
#DataRescue

Resulting conversations led to the creation of @datarescueproject.org a new coalition of standing orgs and concerned individuals coordinating response efforts and communication with data librarians, grassroots groups, and others. www.datarescueproject.org

Here is a starter pack of some that are here on bksy: bsky.app/starter-pack...

Earlier this month, in response to increasing flurries of queries and concerns, @lyndamk.bsky.social started a Google doc to collect information about various efforts and to remind people about resources like EOT, as well as others - @envirodgi.bsky.social, @harvardlil.bsky.social, many more.

Some level of change occurs with every administration. However, with the rapid wholesale deletion of content we have been seeing in the last month, there is a heightened sense of urgency to get things nominated. And there’s also the fact that crawls aren’t the best method for capturing datasets.

Thankfully, efforts like the @eotarchive.org End of Term Web Crawl were already in place. Since 2008, the EOT partners have worked to create snapshots of federal web content at the end of each presidential administration. eotarchive.org

The pace of data removal is unlike anything we experienced previously. Data rescue events had gone well into early summer 2017 and were primarily focused on climate change data. In 2025, much of the targeted data targeted this time was gone by the end of January.

We’d intended to delve further into this for our #IDCC25 presentation, but recent developments in #GovInfo felt more pressing. #DataRescue efforts that began in 2016 laid some groundwork for efforts underway today, but this current situation is very different. www.pegiproject.org/blog/2025/2/...

As we began to explore this topic we saw promising alignment. FAIR offers a helpful perspective on the value of a repository-driven approach to information stewardship at the federal agency level. Many agencies were already beginning voluntary engagement with #FAIR.

We started out by seeking to improve awareness of #FAIR within the #GovInfo librarian community and testing out ideas and assumptions about applicability of FAIR principles for understanding challenges in this space. www.pegiproject.org/blog/fairgov...

Following the completion of the national forum project, we created additional resources associated with some of our earlier findings and explored needs around improved infrastructure and education/training. In 2023 we also started to take a closer look at #FAIR as a potential tool for this work.

We held a series of mini-forums that culminated in a national forum in late 2018, followed by report outs with key findings around barriers and potential pathways forward. You can read our reports on those activities here: www.pegiproject.org/publications

For those new to us, an introduction: The PEGI Project came together in 2017 with a goal to connect stakeholders to explore potential models for improved collaboration in preserving born-digital federal government information.

Our original submission for this lightning talk focused on exploration of the application of the FAIR principles as a framework to better understand the US government information ecosystem. However, we ended up going in a different direction for today's talk. #IDCC25

Big thanks to everyone who attended our lightning talk and for your engagement in the Q&A! You can find our work on our website www.pegiproject.org. If you'd like to converse further, please email us at info@pegiproject org. #IDCC25