U of T plans to preserve environmental data

The event, the first of its kind would collaborate with the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library and will serve as a proposal for future archiving sessions, including one planned at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Internet Archive had asked volunteers to help select and organize information that will be preserved before the Trump transition.

Michelle Murphy, one of the organizers and her colleagues planned to take action after they became aware of Trump’s transition team, which included several climate-change non-believers.

Scott Pruitt, who opposed Obama’s climate change policies was recently appointed Oklahoma attorney general by Trump to lead the EPA. He also named former Texas governor Rick Perry who had close ties to the oil industry as energy secretary.

Murphy, who works in science and technology as well as environmental studies, said a great threat was posed to the future of “evidence-based environmental governance” in the U.S. by Trump’s appointments and his campaigns to eliminate the EPA.

In the event of situations in Trump’s reign when pipelines, extraction and industry become less regulated than at present public access to data would be needed in challenging them, she said.

“So this data is not just for posterity – it’s for communities, it’s for organizations, it’s for environmental justice,” said Murphy.

Internet Archive had been used to captured and save government websites at the end of presidential administrations since 2008 to minimize the risk of losing data during major political transitions.

Patrick Keilty, an assistant professor in the faculty of information and co-organizer of Saturday’s event reminded everyone of the history of American and Canadian administrations destroying government data.

He also pointed to George W. Bush’s efforts to shut down the EPA library and destroy scientific documents under former prime minister Stephen Harper.

Keilty said that focus which at present is on the EPA, targeted for cuts, would shift also to other agencies and departments.

“We don’t think that on Day One, Jan. 20, that he’s inaugurated, all the data will be lost,” he said. “We’re sort of concerned the defunding will mean that the data are starved out over time.”

“It takes a lot of resources – manpower, money – to maintain data, curate it, make it publicly accessible, and if they plan to defund these programs, then they’re also basically defunding public access to their data.”

Keilty said that web crawlers, automated applications typically used to index online content, can’t always capture content such as spreadsheets, PDF files, or a database.

For this reason, Keilty said that they needed people with good research or organization skills to manually go through the sites and find the most at-risk information.

The event is scheduled to run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the University of Toronto.

“It’s a huge undertaking but it’s better than doing the sort of wait-and-see strategy that I think some people have decide to take toward the transition.”

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)