Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure

In the three decades since Brewster Kahle spun up the nonprofit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it has scaled up to include government websites and datasets—many of which are essential to the engineering and scientific communities. U.S. government agencies like the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA are critical sources of research data, technical specifications, and standards documentation in pretty much every area where IEEE Spectrum’s audience works—AI & computer science, biomedical devices, power and energy, semiconductors, telecommunications…the list goes on. Access to that governmental data directly affects the reproducibility of experiments, the validation of models, and the integrity of the scholarly record. So what happens if an entire dataset vanishes? Among other things, it can invalidate years of research built upon that foundation. Until recently, wholesale deletion of data has been rare. In the United States, presidential transitions typica ... Read full article.