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Digital Lifeline: Saving At-Risk Data

Tip Sheet: New Year, New Lawmakers

Tip Sheet


This tip sheet from Digital Lifeline: Saving At-Risk Data is best used alongside the workshop recording. You'll find valuable information on identifying, preserving and reporting on government data. Using the tip sheet and recording, you will be well equipped with the tools and knowledge to safeguard critical information.


Watch the recording of this workshop session here.

MuckRock Tips and Resources


  • Want to monitor a specific webpage for new updates? It’s now easy to get alerts when a page — or even just a specific part of a page — has changed, thanks to Klaxon Cloud. The Add-On builds on the Marshall Project’s original Klaxon site monitoring tool to let you specify a page to watch and then get email alerts when the part of the page you care about — maybe a list of documents, a key official’s biography, or a daily count on inmates — changes.

  • It also integrates with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for page snapshots, creating a history of tracked pages update, change and even disappear over time, giving you a copy of each version of the page along the way.

  • To use it,  just log in to DocumentCloud and pull up the Klaxon Add-On. You can pin it by clicking the thumbtack icon to make it easier to access down the line — pinned Add-Ons appear on the left-hand sidebar.

  • Klaxon is great if you just want to keep tabs on when a web page updates, but DocumentCloud is most useful if you have documents to actually analyze. Fortunately, the Scraper Add-On will fetch all the linked documents on a given page and drop them into your DocumentCloud account for safe keeping. You can optionally specify a project to put them in.


Questions or comments? Contact Dillon Bergin at dillon@muckrock.com.

Data Curation Network (DCN) Tips and Resources



Questions or comments? Contact Sophia Lafferty-Hess at sophia.lafferty.hess@duke.edu.

Data Rescue Project (DRP) Tips and Resources



Questions or comments? Reach out to Mikala Narlock at mnarlock@iu.edu.

Department of Government Efficiency Scraper and Reporting


Github links


Creating web scrapers


Reporting


Questions or comments? Email Mike Nolan at michael@sunlightsearch.net.



🚨 These Tip Sheets are incredible resources, best used in conjunction with their live, hands-on workshop session component. Watch the recording here.


Questions or comments about Sunlight's workshops and resources? Contact Elizabeth at elizabeth@sunlightsearch.net.

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