The Internet Archive has the ability to Web Archive important sites including that of the U.S. Government. These tend to be static pictures of the site. Similarly librarians and researchers can utilize the Internet Archive to archive important research and data sets that they feel are in danger of being removed. Many rushed to archive this upon Trump’s election as President in his first and second terms.
The IA Wayback Machine hosts the End of Term Web Archive, which “collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.” These are timestamped snapshots of websites. Its director told NPR that six weeks into Trump’s second term, some 73,000 government web pages (and counting) were cataloged before being expunged, including reportedly the only copy of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s interactive timeline of the 2021 Capitol Riot. 1.
Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, which developed the web-archiving tool, Perma.cc, released in February a new archive called Data.Gov Archive. It houses more than 300,000 data sets from data.gov, the U.S. government’s repository of open data. “We’ve built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,” the lab said in announcing the project.
The Leibniz Center for Science and Technology are building a Dark Web of Data harvested from ARXIV at Cornell University. The data is being saved and preserved but is not yet accessible as they are reviewing the permission / rights first.
While the Trump Administration is busy scrubbing official transcripts of Trump’s comments. The Nonprofit American Presidency Project hosts copies of Trump’s speeches and executive orders, social media posts, press pool reports, media interviews, and more—from both his terms as well as his campaigns and transition periods.
The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Their goal is to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. We want to know what is happening in the community so that we can coordinate focus. Efforts include: data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets.
Formed in 2016 to document changes to “vulnerable” federal environmental data, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaboration of professionals advocating for environmental awareness. Its website-monitoring team created a tracker for changes to environment-related federal pages. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has purged information or text related to the climate crisis on many government websites.
Collection of free transcripts from political figures and public events. Journalists, students, researchers, and the general public can explore transcripts of speeches, debates, congressional hearings, press conferences, interviews, podcasts, and more.
This site was founded nonprofit group Defending Democracy Together. It archives all of Trump’s posts on his platform TRUTH Social. While Trump’s TRUTH Social posts are publicly available, the Trump’s Truth site warns that the President’s posts on his own platform “may be deleted at any time.” The archive checks for new posts “every few minutes” and includes
1. Chad de Guzman. As Trump’s White House Purges Public Records, These Independent Databases are Keeping their Own Archives. Time. May 23, 2025. Available Online https://time.com/7288311/trump-transparency-white-house-transcripts-public-records-independent-databases-archives/