How Do I Find ~ Statistics and Data

NOTICE

With the January 20, 2025 change in presidential administrations, data on many government web sites has disappeared or is no longer accessible. There are many efforts underway to try to preserve and make historical and current government data available to researchers and the public. In this guide we've compiled a list of articles about these efforts, recommended best practices, data preservation repositories, and alternative resources to assist Hamilton researchers.

ARTICLES

• Elliott, Vitoria, Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron. US government web sites are disappearing in real time. Wired. February 1, 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/us-government-websites-are-disappearing-in-real-time/?utm_content=bufferf0c22&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=aud-dev
• Miller, N.S. Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites. The Journalist's Resource. January 31, 2025. https://journalistsresource.org/home/researchers-rush-to-preserve-federal-health-databases-before-they-disappear-from-government-websites/
• Nost, Eric, Gretchen Gehrke, Lourdes Vera and Steve Hansen. Why EDGI is preserving data. Patterns. January 10, 2025. https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(24)00323-4
• Quinn, Ryan. As data goes off-line under Trump, environmental researchers are uploading backups. Inside Higher Ed. January 29, 2025. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/01/29/data-goes-line-under-trump-researchers-upload-backups
• Singer, Ethan. Thousands of U.S. government web pages have been taken down since Friday. The New York Times. February 2, 2025.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/upshot/trump-government-websites-missing-pages.html

BEST PRACTICES

• Download data now that you intend to use for current and future projects, and store it securely. 
• Make multiple copies, stored in separate locations.
• Data Management - Checklist for USA Federal Data Backups (MIT Libraries)

GOVERNMENT DATA RESCUE/PRESERVATION REPOSITORIES

• Data Rescue Project
  • A clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk.
• End of Term Web Archive
  • Captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.
• Environmental Data and Governance Initiative - EDGI
  • CDC Environmental Justice Index County Map Series
• Harvard Dataverse - health and environment data
  • CDC Social Vulnerability Index
• Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab - focusing on datasets tracked by Data.gov, federal Github repositories, and PubMed
• ICPSR DataLumos
• Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) - an archive of web pages. Enter a URL to view past versions of a website, even if it no longer exists.
  • CDC datasets
  • Democracy's Library: Freely Accessible Government Data, Documents, Records, and Research
• Public Environmental Data Project
  • CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index
  • Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool
  • Council on Environmental Quality Environmental Justice Scorecard

ALTERNATIVE DATA RESOURCES

• FRED - Federal Reserve Economic Data
• IPUMS - Census and survey data, U.S. and global
• SageData - U.S. and international data from from governmental, commercial, and private organizations
• Social Explorer - Historical U.S. Census data