Finding Data: Archived Government Data

Finding and using data and datasets from various sources. Browse datasets by topic.

This guide is an effort to provide researchers with archived, rescued, and alternative sources of federal data.

Data and Document Rescue Efforts

Existing Alternate Government Data Sources

Tips for Archiving Data

What You Can Do

Other LibGuides of Interest

What You Can Do

Share How This Impacts Your Research
The Data Rescue Project is collecting data stories where researchers can share how the loss of data or access to data is having an impact.

Recommend Data for Preservation

ICPSR DataLumos Recommendation Form
Nominate URL for Inclusion in End of Term Presidential Harvest 2024
The End of Term Archive is accepting nominations for URLs to be crawled/captured until March 31, 2025.
Public Environmental Data Partners Nomination Form
Internet Archive Wayback Machine
Use the Save Page Now feature to suggest a webpage to craw.

Tips for Archiving Data

Download data and its accompanying documentation now that may be useful for current and future projects
When making backups, remember Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) - make multiple copies of data and store in separate locations
Document what data you archived so other can find and use the data. Submit your data rescue information to The Data Rescue Tracker
To learn more, check out the Data Curation Network's Curating for data rescue and MIT Libraries' Checklist for USA federal data backups

Other LibGuides of Interest

Data and Document Rescue Efforts

The following efforts started in response to potential data loss at the federal level. Several welcome submissions or nominations for potential data sources to capture. If you are interested in archiving a data set not accounted for in these resources, or in hosting or participating in a data rescue event, please reach out to data@hshsl.umaryland.edu.

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. Their 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.
Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab Federal Data Archive
The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov
DataLumos | ICPSR
DataLumos is an ICPSR archive for government data resources, such as data from FEMA, IMLS, and the Department of Education. DataLumos is a crowd-sourced repository and accepts deposits of public data resources from the community and recommendations of public data resources that ICPSR itself might add to DataLumos.
CDC Data on Internet Archive
An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.
Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI)
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaborative and network of diverse professionals promoting evidence-based policy-making and public interest science that advances the Environmental Right-to-Know (ERTK). They formed to document and analyze changes to federal environmental data and governance practices.
Public Environmental Data Partners
The Public Environmental Data Partners are committed to preserving and providing public access to federal environmental data. They are a volunteer coalition of several environmental, justice, and policy organizations, researchers across several universities, archivists, and students. They are actively working to archive at-risk federal data such as CDC's Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index, FEMA's Future Risk Index, and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool
End of Term Web Archive
The End of Term Web Archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes from 2008 to 2024. Archived web pages are available via the Internet Archive
Preservation of Electronic Government Information
Preservation of Electronic Government Information (PEGI) is an initiative to address national concerns regarding the preservation of electronic government information by cultural memory organizations for long term use by the public.

Existing Alternate Government Data Sources

These are long standing repositories that have a practice of collecting and archiving government data.

ICPSR
ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) maintains a data archive of 350,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 23 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.ICPSR also collaborates with a number of funders, including US statistical agencies and foundations, to create thematic data collections and data stewardship and research projects.
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.
Census Reporter: Making Census Data Easy to Use
Census Reporter is an independent project to make data from the American Community Survey (ACS) easier to use. It is unaffiliated with the U.S. Census Bureau.
FRED
Federal Reserve Economic Data. Product of the St. Louis Federal Reserve

The following websites synthesize government and other data sources to provide helpful dashboards and analysis.

Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA)
BNIA is dedicated to producing reliable and actionable quality of life indicators for Baltimore’s neighborhoods.Their Vital Signs Open Data Portal provides data and map layers aggregated from federal, city, and private sources on topics such as housing and community development, education and youth, and workforce and economic development
National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA)
NANDA from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research is a publicly available data archive containing measures of the physical, economic, demographic, and social environment at multiple levels of spatial scale (eg, census tract, ZIP code tabulation area, county). Each NaNDA dataset covers all or most of the entire nation (including both rural and urban areas) and represents a set of measures on a single topic of interest, including socioeconomic disadvantage, healthcare, housing, partisanship, and public transit, with temporal coverage dating back to 1981.
Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF)
KFF is a non-profit organization focused on health policy research, polling, and news in the United States. You can find statistics on more than 800 health indicators, including those related to insurance, providers and care, as well as issues of current concern like COVID-19 and mental health. The data come from a variety of sources, including KFF reports, public websites, government surveys, and private organizations.
City Health Dashboard
City Heath Dashboard is hosted by the NYU School of Public Service and NYU Langone Health Department of Population Health with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It provides data for over 900 U.S. Cities. Explore social and economic factors of health, health behaviors, health outcomes, and other indicators influence health.
County Health Rankings
County Health Ranking is a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Explore how factors such as affordable housing, access to education, air quality and other indicators influence health.

**Note: City Health Dashboard and County Health Rankings look at very similar data. If you are looking for information on more urban areas, you may want to start with City Health Dashboards. If you are looking at more rural or less populated areas, start with County Health Rankings

Finding Data: Archived Government Data

Contents

What You Can Do

Recommend Data for Preservation

Tips for Archiving Data

Other LibGuides of Interest

Data and Document Rescue Efforts

Existing Alternate Government Data Sources

Projects Maintained by the HSHSL

University of Maryland Schools

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