Welcome back covid.gov
The Data Rescue Project, as a clearinghouse of data access points, loves highlighting partners and initiatives! Today, we feature Webrecorder, a company that develops web archiving tools and open source solutions to preserve dynamic and interactive websites, such as Browsertrix, that are used by many groups focused on web crawling. In addition to partnering with the End of Term Web Archive, they have developed an exciting project called the US Government Web Archive. This archive provides access to mirrors of government websites that have been removed, such as USAID, or substantially altered, such as the CDC. You can read more about the project on Webrecorder’s blog post.
We want to highlight the covid.gov site (the mirror URL is covid.govarchive.us), not only because it is the newest site to be significantly modified but because of the collaboration that led to its existence. Webrecorder worked with Safeguarding Research and Culture (SRC), another group in the data rescue effort. SRC and DRP have worked together in many of our rapid response rescues, with SRC focusing on web crawls and bulk data and DRP focusing on dataset rescue. Combining these efforts helps to ensure a richer understanding of archived government information and data. Web crawling can capture the context of the website and, in many cases, can include links to datasets. To ensure the long-term findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR!) of the individual datasets, the Data Rescue Project uploads them into ICSPSR’s DataLumos, a crowd-sourced repository built for data. Redundancy helps avoid the challenge of one point of failure. It gives space for the multiplicity of expertise areas needed to make altered, removed, or abandoned government information and data available and discoverable in the long term.
We love true collaboration at the Data Rescue Project and welcome anyone who wants to think about ways to tackle the challenges we face. Only by working together can we face an uncertain future!
