Groups at universities and research labs are forming to preserve data. Naseem Miller reports:
The ad hoc group that organized Friday’s data marathon at Chan School calls itself “The Preserving Public Health Data Collective” and it’s part of a growing effort among researchers and academic institutions across the U.S. to save federal health websites and databases.
Researchers are using different tools, including downloading datasets, scraping websites and archiving them with the Wayback Machine, which is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library of Internet sites. It enables users to see how websites looked in the past.
The changes to government websites are happening faster than researchers can keep up with.
There are some tips on how you can preserve websites, including saving them to the Wayback Machine and suggesting databases to The Data Liberation Project.
