Alexandria, VA - Coherent Digital has just completed work to preserve the EPA archive on its flagship platform, Policy Commons. 

In March, reports started to circulate that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had announced plans to shutter its archive in July because the outdated site was no longer “cost effective,” even though the EPA itself acknowledges that “the materials in this archive may be useful as background documents to supplement current information or to provide a historical perspective on a topic.” 

The reports went on to quote the EPA as saying that it planned to migrate the content to “other places,” but that the EPA’s procedures for managing web content might lead to some reports’ being deleted. In other words, the archive’s content would be scattered, and some content might not remain accessible online.

“When we heard about this,” said Coherent Digital’s Toby Green, Policy Commons’ publisher, “we realized that preserving the archive matched our mission to tame wild content—to find content in danger of disappearing and make it stable, findable, and preserved in a permanent home. So, I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve preserved 32,748 documents from the archive, and these are now available within Policy Commons for our members to explore and use.”

The archive contains news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and fact sheets that break down the impact of environmental legislation—vital for understanding how regulation and enforcement have changed over the years. It also contains information on climate change that the Trump administration deleted from the EPA’s website.

Policy Commons, launched at the beginning of 2021, indexes over 3.2 million items from more than 8,500 policy organizations—NGOs, IGOs, think tanks, government agencies, parliaments, and research centers—and preserves items when possible to protect them from disappearing.

About Coherent Digital 

Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, Elizabeth Robey, and others. We find wild content and make it useful—so researchers can do their work, educators can teach, scholars can publish, and organizations can disseminate their knowledge to a global audience. Through Coherent, information is saved, uniquely tagged, stabilized, and made discoverable.