Data Preservation Resources

Are you looking for data that have been altered, removed, or discontinued?

Please check with one of the data archiving and monitoring projects:

• dataindex.us - America's Data Index monitors federal data infrastructure from dataset availability and new releases to planned and unplanned changes to collections.
• DataLumos - DataLumos, run by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), is a crowd-sourced repository for valuable government data.
• Data Rescue Project - The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. The 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. The Data Rescue Project also runs the The Data Rescue Tracker–a collaborative tool built to catalog existing public data rescue efforts so that we can coordinate better across initiatives.
• Finding Missing Government Websites - The University of Michigan Library has compiled a list of non-governmental resources that have some US government-produced data.
• Harvard Dataverse - The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data. Each individual Dataverse collection is a customizable collection of datasets (or a virtual repository) for organizing, managing, and showcasing datasets.
• Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) - ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 810 academic institutions and research organizations. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR also oversees the DataLumos project.
• IPUMS - IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services are available free of charge.
• Public Environmental Data Partners - The Public Environmental Data Partners are a volunteer coalition of several environmental, justice, and policy organizations, researchers across several universities, archivists, and students who rely on federal datasets and tools to support critical research, advocacy, policy, and litigation work. They curate a substantial collection of archived data.
• Safeguarding Research & Culture's SciOp - SciOp's goal is to ensure that our cultural, intellectual and scientific heritage exists in multiple copies, in multiple places. Our goal is to ensure that our cultural, intellectual and scientific heritage exists in multiple copies, in multiple places.
• Tracking Government Information (TGI) - TGI tracks removed, modified, and impacted federal government information & resources.

• Urban Institute’s Data Catalogue - The Urban Institute Data Catalog is a place to discover and download open data provided by Urban Institute researchers and data scientists. You can search for specific datasets or view all of our public datasets. Please review the data license attached to each dataset before using. The Urban Institute is currently hosting several federal public datasets under the 'Preserved Datasets' topic. These datasets are ones that remain unavailable on their respective federal websites.

• U.S. Government Information: Weekly Roundup - The Weekly Roundup from UCSD provides a guide to information resources by and about the federal government. 

• U.S. Census Bureau Disclosure Avoidance Handbook and Briefs
  • Report: Disclosure Avoidance for the 2020 Census: An Introduction
  • Brief 1: Disclosure Avoidance and the 2020 Census Redistricting Data
  • Brief 2: Why the Census Bureau Chose Differential Privacy
  • Brief 3: Disclosure Avoidance and the 2020 Census: How the TopDown Algorithm Works
  • Brief 4: Disclosure Avoidance Methods for the Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A (Detailed DHC-A): How SafeTab-P Works
  • Brief 5: Disclosure Avoidance and the 2020 Census: How SafeTab-H Works
  • Brief 6: Disclosure Avoidance for the Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (DHC) and Guidance for Data Users
  • Brief 7: Disclosure Avoidance and the Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (S-DHC): How PHSafe Works

Are we missing a data archive?

Please contact us and let us know.