Research Data Management

The purpose of this guide is to provide information and tools for managing and archiving your data in light of potential data and information loss under the new administration. For further support and consultations regarding the contents of this guide, please email mlib-data@lists.utah.edu. Additional RDM guidance is available on our LibGuide.

For official University of Utah guidance and updates on federal funding and the availability of government information and data, please see the VPR’s Update on Federal Funding, the OSP’s Executive Actions and Federal Agency Updates, and the University of Utah’s Federal Transition Guidance.

Credit to Data Rescue Project for archived data and tools locations. Special thanks to all who have contributed to data rescue efforts.

A current list of data deemed to be at risk: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government

For updates, follow:

• The Data Rescue Project website and Blue Sky account @datarescue2025@bsky.social
• Peter Suber's (of Harvard's Library) updates

• Pre-prints of research removed from official sources may be available on OSF or institutional repositories
• Government website archives:
  • https://eotarchive.org/ archive of government websites prior to the administration change
  • https://govdiff.com/ compares government websites before and after the administration change
• Government document archives:
  • US Federal Document Archive from HathiTrust
  • The American Presidency Project (APP)
  • Reclaim the Records
• Government data archives:
  • Internet Archive and Democracy's Library
  • IPUMS census and survey data​
  • Data.gov Archive from Harvard
  • FRED - Federal Reserve Economic Data ​
  • For CDC: EDGI, Public Environmental Data Project, ICPSR, ICPSR Data Lumos, UCSB LSIT Data Mirroring, Internet Archive​
  • For NIH: UCSB LSIT Data Mirroring​
  • For NOAA: The Climate Mirror Project, UCSB LSIT Data Mirroring, Internet Archive (heat-index files)​
  • For HRSA: Healthy Regions Policy Lab at UIUC​
  • For EPA: Healthy Regions Policy Lab at UIUC​
  • For DOE: Open Energy Data Initiative​
  • For NCBI genome data: IGSR (1000 genomes data mirrored to UK)

For more, please reference the guide: United States Government Information: Non-Governmental Data Archives and Repositories

Data Rescue Guides from Other Institutions:

• American University: Government Information Data Rescue
• Butler University: Alternative Sources for Archived Government Data
• GODORT:  2025 Presidential Transition
• Hamilton College: How Do I Find Statistics and Data?
• Haverford College: Web Archiving and Data Rescue
• The Ohio State University: 2025 Federal Data Availability
• Salem State: Data Preservation 2025
• Syracuse University: Numeric Data Resources: Preserving Government Data
• UC Merced: Looking for U.S. Federal Data?
• University of Albany:  Government Info Beyond .gov
• University of Minnesota: Finding Government Information During the 2025 Administration Transition
• University of Notre Dame: Archived Federal Data 2025
• University of Virginia: Government Information Data Rescue

• Archiving tools
  • https://archivebox.io/
  • https://webrecorder.net/
  • https://github.com/simon987/awesome-datahoarding
• Repository options
  • If you would like to move your dataset to an alternative or additional repository, we recommend the following options.
  • The Hive: the University of Utah’s institutional data repository
  • OSF: free and open source repository
  • Zenodo: free and open repository
  • See this guide to generalist repositories along with file size limitations, ability to handle sensitive data, etc.
• File management
  • 3-2-1 backups – you should (aim) to have:
    • 3 copies of your data, in
    • 2 different locations, with at least
    • 1 in cloud-based storage
  • Version control
    • Utilize file naming to keep track of versions and updates to your data
    • Can be documented through version number (v1, v2, etc.) or date of update (recommended format YYYYMMDD)
  • Metadata – important pieces of information:
    • Creator(s)
    • Description
    • Links to relevant publications
    • Key dates: collection, publication, versioning dates, etc.
    • Key locations