This article first appeared at dataindex.us on 2/5/2026 and was cross-posted today as a guest post to the Data Rescue Project. Yesterday, the CIA made the surprising decision to shut down the World Factbook after more than sixty years of operation. This move was not just a simple website update.

The Data.gov team rolled out a beta-version of the next iteration of the Federal Data Catalog: https://catalog-beta.data.gov/. While there does not appear to be a new landing page as part of this release, there are notable changes to the look and feel of the catalog search page as well as to individual dataset pages (compare with https://catalog.data.gov). The beta-version is much more barebones.

Metadata for nearly 60,000 new datasets were added to the Federal Data Catalog (FDC) on Data.gov in the first two weeks of 2026. The totals reported on the Data.gov landing page rose from 376,504 on midnight January 1st to 433,944 at noon January 13th. Almost all of that increase was the result of adding new federal data assets to the catalog, which now appear to total 397,191.

It’s been a very long time since I had my own blog. In recent years, I’ve had the privilege of guest blogging for various outlets, including The White House, The Good Science Project, dataindex.us, and Upstream (among others). I’ll continue to guest blog from time-to-time when a topic is appropriate for a specific venue. However, I can’t always find a home for some of my perspectives and this blog will fill that void in my publishing portfolio.