Developments in U.S. federal government information : Archives of government data sets

Data Rescue Project (DRP)

• From the DRP’s FAQ page:  “The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Our 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.” 
• Website includes
  • Instructions on how to host your own “data rescue event”/do your own data rescue.
  • The DRP Portal, “a centralized, searchable hub, integrating datasets from multiple rescue efforts such as Public Environmental Data Partners, Safe Guarding Research & Culture, ICPSR, and more. The Portal makes it easy to discover rescued datasets by government offices sharing the data, topic, and more.”
  • News about data rescue efforts, data at risk, articles/editorials about the importance of federal data.
  • Opportunities for public participation!  See the DRP’s FAQ page.

Archive of Data.gov

• Search interface: Data.gov Archive Search  
• From Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab.
• It runs a "shallow crawl" that collects only the directly-linked files. Datasets that link only to a landing page will need to be collected separately.
• Includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025.

What is Data.gov?

• Provides public access to high-value, machine readable-datasets generated by the executive branch of the federal government.
• Dataset catalog allows to you search by keyword, and limit by formats, organization types, and organizations, among other limits.
• For each entry, there's metadata about the dataset.  In many cases (but not all), there's also a link to the data set.
• Includes some datasets from:
  • State governments
  • City governments
  • County governments
  • Universities
• More information about Data.gov
  • About Us
  • User Guide (provides information on how and why Data.gov harvests the datasets it does)

As part of the Federal Depository Library Program, the UW-Madison Libraries make U.S. government publications available to the public at no fee.

See the guide U.S. Government Publications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for more information on finding U.S. government publications.