Beyond federal websites (.gov, .mil) there are lot of gov contractor websites that are being taken down (presumably at the demand of agencies) that contain a wealth of information and years of project research.
The pedestrian "right", which I encounter on a day-to-day basis the months I visit client sites a couple hundred miles inland of the Gulf of America, will look at climatelinks.org and say something like: "all I see are foreign countries, why are we spending money on this instead of citizens of the United States?".
IMHO, we should do it because the person who pays tends to have more power over what happens. Just like how in high school the kid who drives everyone tends to have a higher than normal say in what the friend group does.
> Why should US fund WHO ~5-6 times more than China [0] (and more than EU)
The base contributions are a function of GDP. The extra contributions are voluntary, and the US did it because it was in the US’ interests. It’s a founding error in the US foreign policy budget and was a good investment in terms of goodwill and data for American health research institutions.
WHO must focus where it is needed most. Public health is much better in the EU (and even in Europe, accounting for places like Belarus and Ukraine) than in China, and there are much fewer epidemics that emerge in Europe in general.
The whole idea is that if we limit the emergence of epidemics where they are likely to happen, we end up with fewer pandemics after these epidemics spread worldwide (which includes Europe and North America). The whole world is better without another COVID, Ebola, or Polio.
> only to have the WHO be controlled by China
This is bullshit. The WHO is not controlled by China any more than other UN institutions. What is certain, though, is that the US won’t have any say whatsoever once they are out.
“The whole idea is that if we limit the emergence of epidemics where they are likely to happen, we end up with fewer pandemics after these epidemics spread worldwide”
I realize I’m arguing against a negative but has that actually been accomplished? I don’t argue that they (I assume) probably help with things like Ebola outbreaks but that’s almost certainly never going to become a pandemic.
I'd love to learn more about what is in scope of the Library Innovation Lab projects. Is it targeting data.gov specifically or all government agency websites?
Given the rapid take downs of websites (cdc, usaid) do you have a prioritization framework for which website pages to prioritize or do you have "comprehensive" coverage of pages (in scope of the project)?
As you allude to, I've been having a hard time learn about what sort of duplicate work might be happening given that there isn't a great "archived coverage" source of truth for government websites (between projects such as End of Term archive, Internet archive, research labs, and independent archivists).
Your open questions are interesting. Content hashes for each page/resource would be a way to do quick comparisons, but I assume you might want to set some threshold to determine how much it's changed vs if it changed?
Is the second question about figuring out how to prioritize valuable stuff behind two depth traversals? (ex data.gov links to another website and that website has a csv download)
As a library, the very high level prioritization framework is "what would patrons find useful." That's how we started with data.gov and federal Github repos as broad but principled collections; there's likely to be something in there that's useful and gets lost. Going forward I think we'll be looking for patron stories along the lines of "if you could get this couple of TB of stuff it would cover the core of what my research field depends on."
In practice it's some mix of, there aren't already lots of copies, it's valuable to people, and it's achievable to preserve.
> Is the second question about figuring out how to prioritize valuable stuff behind two depth traversals?
Right -- how do you look at the 300,000 entries and figure out what's not at depth one, is archivable, and is worth preserving? If we started with everything it would be petabytes of raw datasets that probably shouldn't be at the top of the list.
This administration is taking down public websites and resources at an alarming rate. Including scientific documents, health surveys, project research documents that are referenced daily by government staff, contractors, and US international partners.
I recently became aware of this issue and this post made me interested to know if there are any comprehensive datasets tracking these take downs. Also would be interested to know what other efforts exist to archive at risk government websites.
Partial list of removed pages and entire websites I'm compiling:
- USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse (stores 50yrs of international aid records) https://dec.usaid.gov/dec/
DoJ also removed all information about January 6th. We’re watching 1984 in real time. If it wasn’t happening in my country it would be interesting to watch the outcomes and how supporters contort themselves to say it’s ok.
It's not happening in my country and the contorsions I see only make me weep for humanity. This whole thing is horrifying, and it's happening to cheers.
Some below of contractors that work with US AID:
- https://www.edu-links.org/ (taken down)
- https://www.genderlinks.org/ (taken down)
- https://usaidlearninglab.org/ (taken down)
- https://agrilinks.org/ (presumably at risk)
- https://www.climatelinks.org/ (presumably at risk)
- https://biodiversitylinks.org/ (presumably at risk)