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When government data disappears: How to cross-check, preserve, and investigate

Updated: Oct 9

Tip Sheet: New Year, New Lawmakers

IRE 2025 and AccessFest 2025 Tip Sheet



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This tip sheet can be used to find information on the disappearance of government data and explore what you can do to keep track of data relevant to your research and reporting.

Examples of Government Data and Information Archives



  • MuckRock

    • Requests (FOIA) 

    • Document Cloud

    • 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? Contact MuckRock's Dillon Bergin at dillon@muckrock.com.




Tools for Archiving Content

Tools for Archiving Data

Tools for Change Detection

  • Visualping – Visual/text change tracking with alerts, Chrome extension (freemium)

  • WebSite-Watcher – Advanced local tool for Windows ($$)

  • Distill.io – Content tracking with local app, browser, Chrome extension  (freemium)

  • PageCrawl.io – Team-friendly archiving and alerts (freemium)

  • Wachete – Tracks private/password-protected pages (freemium)

  • ChangeTower – Keyword and content change alerts (freemium)

  • Fluxguard – HTML, visual and text tracking, translation (freemium)

  • Follow That Page – Basic email alerts for text changes

  • SiteDelta – Firefox-only in-browser tracker

  • KeyCDN Tools  – check HTTP header for when page was last modified

Tips for Archiving


Questions about the Data Curation Network? Contact Sophia Lafferty-Hess at sophia.lafferty.hess@duke.edu.

Creating Web Scrapers

DOGE Scraper Github Links

Articles written with BLN DOGE tables

Other Sunlight Research Center Resources

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

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