Research Data Services

The RDS team is tracking developments in the availability of federal datasets that are often used by researchers around the world. While we are not engaged in data rescue efforts, this page collates available resources for researchers that are looking for alternative sources of data. A wide range of groups are working on these efforts, and their listing is not an express endorsement by the RDS team, UT Libraries, or the University of Texas at Austin. There is a relatively central group that tracks and helps coordinate data rescue efforts, the Data Rescue Project; unfortunately, their website, and a number of others that have been recently spun up, may be blocked on campus Wi-Fi due to issues with their SSL certification. A semi-continually maintained Google Document that led to the full website spin-up should be accessible to anyone.

• End of Term Web Archive: A long-term effort to archive webpages of each U.S. administration during the presidential transition, dating back to 2008; partners include the Internet Archive and several universities and non-profits. Note that the National Archives and Records Administration preserves White House pages. 
• Mirror of data.gov: An effort by the Harvard Law School Library to continually mirror data.gov

Multi-dataset platforms

These are data archives that may contain a wide-ranging mix of datasets.

• DataLumos: This is a project of ICPSR, the largest data archive for social science datasets, which is maintained at the University of Michigan. Users can find data, suggest data for archiving, or upload data themselves.
• IPUMS: This is an independent database of government-collected data, primarily census and survey data.
• Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center (CAFE): This is an assorted set of federal datasets (mainly related to climate and health) and includes both recent and older records. It is hosted in Harvard's institutional repository.
• UCSB archive: This is a locally hosted Git server that hosts public data mainly from the CDC, NIH, and NOAA.

Specific datasets

• Static archive of CDC datasets: This is a ~100 GB deposit on the Internet Archive that contains all public, non-corrupted CDC datasets available as of January 28, 2025.
• Archive and interactive of most recent census: This is an independent interface for exploring the most recent census data.