Preservation of Government Information:

a call to action

March 12, 2026

Problem statement:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”^[1] 

An informed citizenry is vital for democracy, and knowledge must empower the people to prevent tyranny and maintain liberty. An informed citizenry is impossible without public access to and preservation of Public Information.^[2]

Government information is being lost every day because of the inadequacy of government preservation policies. In addition to these unintended losses, the last year has shown that, in the absence of a preservation infrastructure for government information, an administration can intentionally alter and remove information, effectively destroying the public record and deleting irreplaceable information on purpose.

In the absence of a legally mandated, comprehensive, well-funded government program to successfully preserve Public Information, it is essential that non-government memory institutions (libraries and archives) take the lead in actively curating and preserving Public Information for their communities.

We call on information professionals to continue to work together to actively curate born-digital U.S. Public Information^[3] to assure that it is preserved and able to withstand partisan attacks against an informed public.

Guiding principles:

• Public Information is a public good.

• In order to fully participate in democracy, the public requires a comprehensive record of the government’s Public Information as documentation of the actions of its government.

• The public information that the government collects, creates, and aggregates must be preserved because it is valuable and irreplaceable.

• All Public Information should adhere to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and governments should be required to produce freely available “archive-ready” Public Information.

• Libraries, archives, and other memory institutions, as trusted non-profit public institutions outside the control of government that adhere to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights,^[4] have long provided critical assurance against accidental or malicious information loss. These institutions have an enduring obligation to their communities, the wider public, and democracy itself to curate, preserve, and provide long term access to government information and data.

A call to action:

Signatories to this statement agree to these guiding principles of Public Information and come together in collaboration and solidarity to:

1. Work cooperatively toward building a shared, public Digital Preservation Infrastructure (DPI) that assures the long-term preservation of Public Information.^[5] The DPI will include tools, standards, and workflows for selecting, acquiring, storing, organizing, and preserving Public Information and for providing services for that information to their communities. The DPI will empower libraries and archives with the ability to select information for inclusion in a comprehensive public archive of Public Information, and with the ability to select information from that archive to define collections and develop information services for their communities.
2. Advocate for an essential update to U.S. information policy (notably Title 44 of the U.S. Code and OMB Circular A-130: ”Managing information as a strategic resource”) that requires all agencies to publish “archive-ready” Public Information including data management and preservation plans for all produced data in order to sustain a public DPI.

It is imperative that like-minded people and organizations collaborate to build a more robust and resilient government information ecosystem for the future.

If you agree, please sign on to this call to action! We’ll be in touch with next steps!!

James Jacobs and Jim Jacobs, Free Government Information (FGI)

Further reading: (This list is not meant to be exhaustive, just an example of published works of importance and context for this call to action.)

Seminal works:

Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future. James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs. 2025.

“The Nation’s Data at Risk - Meeting American’s Information Needs for the 21st Century.” American Statistical Association, 2024.

Visualizing changes to US federal environmental agency websites, 2016–2020. Nost, E., Gehrke, G., Poudrier, G., Lemelin, A., Beck, M., Wylie, S., & et al. (2021). PLoS ONE, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246450.

Environmental scan of government information and data preservation efforts and challenges. Sarah K. Lippincott for the Preservation of Electronic Government Information (PEGI) Project. 2018.

Born-digital U.S. federal government information: preservation and access. (recorded presentation: https://youtu.be/GGD-6T3FkA0). Prepared for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). James A. Jacobs. 2014.

“Undiscovered Public Knowledge.” Don R. Swanson. The Library Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), pp. 103-118. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4307965.

Statements and standards:

Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online. OurFutureMemory.org.

Charting a FAIR Direction for the US Government Information Ecosystem. Preservation of Electronic Government Information (PEGI) Project. 2024.

“FGI submits OMB A-130 comments. Help us raise OMB awareness of library issues.” Jacobs and Jacobs, Free Government Information (FGI), 11/19/2015. https://freegovinfo.info/node/10581/

OAIS Reference Model (ISO 14721). The fundamental standard for digital preservation.

Eight principles of open government data. Sebastopol, CA. December 7-8, 2007.

Association of Public Data Users (APDU) Guiding Principles for Public Data.

News articles:

Freilich, Janet, and Aaron S. Kesselheim. “Data Manipulation within the US Federal Government.” The Lancet 406, no. 10500 (2025): 227–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01249-8.

Gehrke,Gretchen. The Trump administration is disappearing climate change data. The Hill. 02/27/26.

Gurin, Joel. “From Crisis to Opportunity: Building the Data Ecosystem America Deserves.” Text. The Hill, July 17, 2025. https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5404243-trump-administration-data-changes/.

Koebler, Jason. “Archivists Work to Identify and Save the Thousands of Datasets Disappearing From Data.Gov.” 404 Media, January 30, 2025. https://www.404media.co/archivists-work-to-identify-and-save-the-thousands-of-datasets-disappearing-from-data-gov/.

Lucas, Julian. “The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge.” The Lede. The New Yorker, March 14, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge.

Rothfritz, Laura. “Emergency Curation as Anticipatory Maintenance: Lessons from the 2016/2017 Data Rescue Movement” (Feb 2026).