We Never Thought We’d Need to Do This: Locating and Preserving At-Risk Federal Publications in Hyrax

In February 2025, many datasets were removed from United States federal government websites. This alarming development led library staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) to worry that federally funded articles and research outputs might follow. To preserve UNC-CH authored research in service of UNC-CH's Open Access Policy, librarians rapidly developed and deployed the Federal Repository Harvesting Project. For this project, we identified UNC-CH authored research held in multiple federal repositories, harvested metadata and available PDFs, and uploaded the outputs to our Hyrax-based institutional repository.  In this presentation, I will describe the project, including our repository identification criteria, our methods of harvesting eligible content, and the ingest process. I will reflect on the lessons that our team learned as we deployed a project rapidly to address a continually changing issue. Finally, I will address the changes that we have made to our repository collection strategy to convert the project from a one-off to an ongoing process.