Because I'm a government information librarian, and because I care deeply about these issues, I have been trying to contribute to ongoing efforts to raise awareness of access and preservation of federal information. Resources I curate that may be helpful include:
This is a current awareness resource, meant to highlight important or newsworthy agency press releases, OIG reports, CBO/CRS/GAO reports, congressional hearings & news, and more. At the bottom of each week's roundup is a "Web Content Changes/Preservation" section, where I list some of the content changes I've identified during the week as well as news articles addressing content changes.
This is a companion to my GovSpeak guide to federal acronyms, which links to more than 10,000 live federal websites. I run frequent link checks across GovSpeak to identify links that are not working, and track them on the errors page. The errors page is continually edited throughout the month, with a final list provided at the end of each month.
This page includes a list of websites that track various actions being taken by the Trump administration. The list includes tools for tracking executive orders, climate and immigration actions, litigation, regulatory changes, and more.
U.S. Government Information LibGuide
While not specifically designed to address the challenges of the Trump administration changes, this guide organizes and links to a lot of useful resources for federal information. I especially recommend checking out the "Key Resources" on the home page, as these are some of the best resources for locating federal information. Note that some resources listed on the guide are available remotely only to UCSD affiliates.
It may not be an intuitive place to search for government information, but the Library's catalog is a great place to search for federal publications. All of our print federal documents are cataloged, as well as many freely available online publications. The example below shows a search for the Joint Force Quarterly journal; note the option in red on the left allows you to limit results to online publications. Results on the right show #1 is online, while #3 is a print publication in our federal documents collection.
As I've mentioned, some journal articles and other publications have been/are being removed from federal websites. The Library may have alternate access to some of this material. The image below shows the online availability options for the Joint Force Quarterly searched above. Options outlined in red are freely available web resources that may be subject to removal/altering; the other options are resources the library pays for and are not as likely to remove/alter material.
This link takes you to an alphabetical listing of databases on the Library's website. Most of these are subscription databases, though there are a few open access databases as well. Note the red box, which indicates that I've limited the 940 total databases in the A-Z list to the databases best for finding government information and statistics. These resources may be helpful in finding federal publications and statistics that are no longer available on the open web and/or alternate sources for similar information.
While the subscription databases are less vulnerable to having content removed or altered, be aware that content may change due to changes in the way federal information is produced. For example, if the government stops collecting data on a particular topic, then that data obviously would not be available for inclusion in databases. Likewise, databases produced by the government are vulnerable to content changes and loss of access. The Homeland Security Digital Library, for example, which is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security, is currently unavailable in both free and subscription formats and shows only the banner below.
