Guerrilla Archiving: Saving Environmental Data from Trump

This event collaborates with the Internet Archive’s End of Term 2016 project, which seeks to archive the federal online pages and data that are in danger of disappearing during the Trump administration. Our event is focused on preserving information and data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has programs and data at high risk of being removed from online public access or even deleted. This includes climate change, water, air, toxics programs. This project is urgent because the Trump transition team has identified the EPA and other environmental programs as priorities for the chopping block.

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based nonprofit digital library which aims at preserving and making universally accessible knowledge. Its End of Term web archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites that are at risk of changing or disappearing altogether during government transitions. The Internet Archive has asked volunteers to help select and organize information that will be preserved before the Trump transition. This event is part of Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which is a large grassroots collaborative research and monitoring project preparing for changes to environmental science and governance enacted by the Trump administration.

End of Term web archive

“Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time” (The New York Times)

Activities:

1. Identifying endangered programs and data
2. Seeding the End of Term webcrawler with priority URLs
3. Identifying and mapping the location of inaccessible environmental databases
4. Hacking scripts to make accessible to the webcrawler hard to reach databases.
5. Building a toolkit so that other groups can hold similar events

Skills needed: We need all kinds of  people—and that means you!

1. People who can locate relevant webpages for the Internet Archive’s webcrawler
2. People who can identify data targeted for deletion by the Trump transition team and the organizations they work with
3. People with knowledge of government websites and information, including the EPA
4. People with library and archive skills
5. People who are good at navigating databases
6. People interested in mapping where inaccessible data is located at the EPA
7. Hackers to figure out how to extract data and URLs from databases (in a way that Internet Archive can use)
8. People with good organization and communication skills
9. People interested in creating a toolkit for reproducing similar events

Contacts: michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca, p.keilty@utoronto.ca