If you're looking for U.S. demographic information, the website of the Census Bureau can't help you.
In the wake of the U.S. federal government shutdown, the agency's website has been temporarily terminated. A notice that the Census site and its services are unavailable replaces the usual supply of facts and figures.
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The Census Bureau is just one of a handful of federal websites that have gone dark during the shutdown, the nation's first since 1995. As Ars Technicha reports, ten federal websites are currently inaccessible, including the sites for the Library of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.
Fortunately, however, government websites are not the sole place government information is kept. There are resources available for accessing government data while the shutdown precludes access to certain agency sites.
Quandl, a dataset index, stores data from more than 20 U.S. government websites.
The site hosts 3,000 datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, ranging in topic from U.S. imports and exports with China to the number of reported tetanus cases in a given year.
Similarly, Quandl has stored 7,000 datasets from the Department of Agriculture, whose website is also inaccessible during the shutdown.
According to its website, Quandl has indexed millions of datasets from over 400 sources.
Investigative Reporters and Editors has a tool aimed to help users navigate the 2010 Census. IRE's project, developed for journalists but free for anyone to use, lets users sort demographic information by county, state and other locations.
In addition to its Census database, all of IRE's data libraries are open during the shutdown. That includes an aviation safety reporting system dataset usually maintained by NASA, whose website is down, and a database on campus crime, gleaned from Department of Education reporting.
The shutdown, however, hasn't darkened all government websites. Some are still available, but have placed notices that content may not be updated or actively managed at the top of their homepages.
FEMA warns visitors to its site that "non-disaster assistance transactions submitted via the website may not be processed or responded to until after appropriations are enacted." The U.S. Botanic Garden's homepage notifies visitors that its ground are closed, but the website's informational pages remain searchable.
Still other agency websites appear as if nothing has happened. The CIA's homepage makes no mention of the shutdown. The same goes for the sites of the the Supreme Court and the Federal Elections Commission.
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