DONALD Trump’s assault on anything that challenges his administration’s belief system has put librarians on the front line. Many are now working with researchers to save information before it is removed or destroyed, and want to make it accessible to the public and the research community again.

In this article James R. Jacobs, US Government Information Librarian at Stanford University in California, explains the situation in the US and members of the core team at Safeguarding Research & Culture (SRC) – William Waites, University of Southampton, Ashley Gay (sysadmin of SRC), Henrik Schönemann, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Jez Cope, Data Services Lead at the British Library – provide a non-US perspective.

Executive disorder

Often framed as protections for US citizens and corporations, Donald Trump’s executive orders have disrupted US government information including science and research in specific areas like climate change, diversity, equality and inclusion, but have impacted many more.

Executive Order 14168, for example, is framed as a protection for women and requires federal government departments to only recognise male and female and to remove materials and funding promoting “gender ideology”.

Climate science is affected by many executive orders including “Unleashing American Energy”, which cancelled research into the social cost of greenhouse gases, including human health effects, property damage, and disruption of energy systems.

Inside the US

So how bad is it? James R. Jacobs, Stanford University, says: “I don’t know if I can quantify the data loss. There is a system-wide attack on science writ large. There have been specific datasets targeted for deletion… And there has been wholesale destruction of the infrastructure of data collection through the blocking and/or complete cancellation of many billions of dollars in grant funding, the firing of federal employees across the executive branch including the complete erasure of entire agencies and sub-agencies like USAID and CDC.

It’s important to note the illegality of all of this; government data gathering is generally something that is required by specific laws and regulations.”

Global impact

Asked why these events matter outside the US, James says: “The importance of the US government’s statistics and data gathering system on the world cannot be overstated. Countries, researchers, scientists, students and the general public around the world use and rely on US government information and data. So the loss of staff across all of the federal data gathering agencies will be felt around the world for many years to come.

One small anecdote to highlight this: last week, a researcher contacted me looking for data specific to Cambodia, including demographics and other variables down to the province/district level. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had for many years collated these data. Because the Trump administration shut down USAID and fired all of its staff, the data for all countries, not just for Cambodia, have been lost. Not only that, but IGO’s like the United Nations (UN) point to and rely on the USAID data on data.un.org. So it’s clear that people and governments around the world rely on the information and data produced by federal agencies.”

Stress test

Most democracies will claim they have built-in protection from radical politicians acting illegally. But when the bottom line is the law, that safety net depends on the speed and power of the legal system.

James says: “Almost all of Trump’s executive orders are illegal on their face because they abrogate the separation of powers set out in the US Constitution.” He pointed out that farmers groups had won a lawsuit to restore climate-related data, but added: “Unfortunately, this administration is ‘flooding the zone’ and doing its illegal actions very quickly and the US legal system – which has always been slow! – is in the midst of an unprecedented political stress test.”

Even the deletion schedules are opaque: “This administration’s actions are seemingly random, but always malicious and capricious and the exact opposite of ‘transparent’. We really are living in Orwell’s 1984! Yes, they are working off a list of words that this administration doesn’t like or agree with. But it is causing things like the deletion from the Dept of Defense website of an image of the WWII airplane called Enola Gay because some automated AI web search found the term ‘gay’. Their ineptitude would be laughable if it weren’t so damaging.”

Why is the law failing?

Trumps actions are exacerbating pre-existing problems as well as adding new ones. “Historically, government information has been published in paper format (primarily) and we have long received reports and documents through the Federal Depository Library Program.”

But due to the shift online, James says: “My collection development work has shifted online as well. I started the LOCKSS-USDOCS program 16 years ago to provide a collaborative preservation network focused on preserving the digital publications produced by the Government Publishing Office (GPO)… a failsafe for disappearing information and a network of access points to the public.”

However, there are big glitches. “There’s a law called Title 44 of the US Code which requires agencies to send their publications to GPO for distribution to the FDLP, but with the advent of the internet, most agencies ignore that law, so you’ll see that govinfo.gov includes only a small amount of content from the executive branch. If agencies would follow the law, much more content and data would be hosted on Govinfo.gov and preservation would be assured in a distributed and collaborative way to assure free access for the long-term.”

James says another project, which he has been working on since 2008, aims to address some of this problem. End of Term Archive takes a broad and deep snapshot of the federal .gov/.mil web domain every four years.

Library role

In his more detailed answers in a Q&A, James lists a number of other library-led projects that preserve government data and a book he recently wrote with a colleague Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.

He says: “Libraries have long had a role in preserving and giving public access to government information (publications AND data). However, the advent of the internet has eroded libraries’ traditional collection and preservation role. One of the key tenets of the FDLP is to provide a preservation buffer for public information. This administration’s attack on public information and the public record has spurred many librarians and others to pitch in toward the work of EOT, DRP, PEDP etc.” He also points out “Kelly Smith, a librarian friend of mine at UC San Diego, is managing a really great “trump tracker” site”.

Outside the US

Organisations outside of the US are also working to preserve threatened US Government information and data. One is Safeguarding Research & Culture which is supported by researchers, librarians and other data and information experts and volunteers from across the EU.

It’s core team members provide a number of examples of how changes in the US have bled across its borders - from bird flu data to a conference travel ban for scientists (later rescinded). But one positive export has also been the speed and energy with which some information professionals have responded to the crisis in the US.

Asked to define SRC’s relationship with the library sector Jez Cope, Data Services Lead at the British Library (SRC is not affiliated with the BL) says: “Henrik was very clear right from the start that having involvement from people with expertise in information management, metadata standards, etc. was vital and that’s clearly a core strength of the profession. I got involved myself by responding to an early call out for librarians.”

Henrik Schönemann, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, says: “We interact with a lot of librarians, especially in coordinating rescue operations as well as partnerships. One of our partners outside the USA is TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library in Hanover.”

He adds that they also worked with librarians in the US: “One of our closest partners is the Data Rescue Project (DRP), which ‘is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network’. Librarians, like the ones who started Data Rescue Project, are irreplaceable and instrumental in preserving information and providing access.”

Institutional risk

Asked if librarians have a role in countering the kind of crisis that Donald Trump has caused, Jez says: “Yes! I think many of our users see libraries as institutions that will always be there as part of the fabric of their world, especially larger research & academic libraries, and assume that because our employers are large and respected and act in the public interest that the material we collect will be safe because we have it and are professionals. But as we’ve seen, size and noble goals are no protection against the attacks happening now. In many cases the values we uphold, such as free and unfettered access to information, are in direct opposition to the goals of oppressive regimes.”

And like James R. Jacobs, SRC has spotted historic technical obstacles to some of its rescue attempts but also believes the Trump administration is being purposefully obstructive.

Henrik says: “From my perspective, it comes in waves. Some warning reaches us and our partners, be it via Executive Orders, media reporting, or insiders. Sometimes there is a timeframe given (as with certain NOAA datasets), but most often the when, what and how is uncertain. I do believe that the uncertainty is not just a by-product, but also the point.”

Ashley Gay, SRC, says: “The administration has attempted to prevent safeguarding efforts, mostly through a lack of transparency and forewarning, with data going down with no signs of its imminent deletion before it’s gone. (eg. covid.gov)”

And William Waites, University of Southampton, added that: “Apart from giving little or no warning, we have seen occasional implementation of measures like captchas or rate limiting to make it harder to save data.”

And like James, William says that some of the problems in saving information are historic. “There are other difficulties that arise from poor architectural choices such as visualisations done in such a way as to make it very difficult to get at the underlying data. For example, the Forestry Service’s climate risk viewer, of particular interest to farmers (who launched a successful lawsuit when it was removed) and so important for food security, is implemented as an ArcGIS web application.”

Library backup

SRC does what libraries would if they could move fast: “I see it as being very complementary,” Jez says. “There’s a lot of great work being done on this by libraries and archives inside and outside the US. For a number of reasons SRC is able to move more quickly than libraries can to make a dataset or website safe, which then allows them to take more time and care over selection and curation decisions, and make things more accessible and usable for the future. Hopefully, in turn we’ll then be able to put these curated versions into the distributed archive so that it’s more resilient in the future.”

Ashley adds: “We’ve already received requests from professionals in various fields requesting we archive certain things. While I can’t speak to librarians specifically, we give people who aren’t technical and may not know how to archive things a way to request things be archived, as well as a relatively easy way to access these things.”