Subject line pretty much says it all. Is there an archive of this data? I know this information can often be found in an encyclopedia, but if it’s not in the encyclopedia or dictionary and you still want to know – who do you ask?
(Yes. The obvious answer is “Cecil.” But … where would he find the answer?)
Well, for starters, there’s the Oxford English Dictionary. Generally reliable for any older term, but obviously not for anything current. Most major libraries have one, and you can subscribe to use it online (in fact, having a library card may entitle you to use it online).
There are many searchable archives of data, some are free, some are pay.
Post your question here and I and others can possibly help.
Cecil asks samclem and the SDMB of course. 
And sam, that band name is already taken, right?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question, but I think “this data” would be “every single thing that was ever published”. If so, then the archive you’re looking for would be the sum total of every public and private library and bookshelf in the world.
The name for that subject field is “Etymology”. The origin of a word is usually included in the more comprehensive dictionaries.
The standard “archive” is the Oxford English Dictionary, which collects significant uses of words, including the first published use. As noted above, the OED is now available online, albeit for a rather hefty subscription fee; some libraries provide free access to cardholders.
Other dictionaries compiled on historical principles take a similar approach, although they may not be online. Perhaps the most notable of these is the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, although the later letters of the alphabet have not yet been published.
There is an active community of professional and amateur linguists who seek to antedate the earliest known uses. They tend to be members of the American Dialect Society and to communicate their findings via the society’s listserv, ADS-L. Samclem and I are both members.
Of course, some antedatings are communicated in other ways, such as in blogs, newspaper columns, or Wikipedia articles. (Theoretically a finding should be published somewhere else before it is on Wikipedia, but that doesn’t always happen.) For example, noted amateur linguist Barry Popik publicizes his discoveries on his own website, http://www.barrypopik.com/.
If you’re thinking of, like, how to get a copyright or trademark on a term, you send it to the Copyright Office or the Trademark Office, and they do the necessary research to see if the term has been used before . . .
. . . by asking Cecil of course.
I remember a previous thread in which we talked about the origin of some word or phrase. The OED’s earliest reference only went back about a hundred years but we were able to find earlier usages via Google Books. I got the impression that the OED emphasizes UK references.
Okay! I have a feeling it won’t be easy, though. I am trying to find out when and how the term “meth” was substituted for the term “speed” in the public arena.
If you’re old enough, you may remember the “Speed Kills” slogan from the 1960’s/ 70s. Contrast this with the current “Meth: Not Even Once.”
I have tried several creative google search terms, and in the course of my research I even braved the entirety of the Wikipedia page on “Just Say No.” Even when I googled “first public use of the term ‘meth’” in quotes, all I got were articles on “the meth epidemic” and ads for rehab facilities.
If you can help, I’d be delighted.
Well, for what it’s worth the Oxford English Dictionary’s first cite for “meth” as an abbreviation of methamphetamine (as opposed to an abbreviation of methylated spirits) is from the Washington Post on 21 August 1966. Then there’s a cite from the Saturday Evening Post from 1967. The first British cite is the Guardian in 1968.
The first cite for “speed” (in the sense of “n amphetamine drug, esp. methamphetamine, freq. taken intravenously”) is from the US in September 1967. There’s a UK cite from November 1967.
So the two terms are more or less equally old, so far as this evidence goes. The OED gives no information on the relative popularity of each, or on changes in popularity over time. Strictly speaking they are not synonyms; meth is not speed, but a kind of speed, and obviously if meth comes to supplant speed in public discourse this might reflect meth acquiring a dominant position over other amphetamines in the marketplace.
Hmm … that’s an angle I had not coinsidered before, UDS. That’s a good point. Still, I think there’s more to it than that. I’m pretty sure that that was the situation for years before the terminology changed.
P.S.: ** American Dialect Society members:** I am fascinated. I would love to know more about this process. Say you wanted to find out when “gnarly” first was used in a grunge context. Would you go first to the OED, then maybe look to see who came first, Pearl Jam or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, stuff like that?
On many, many occasions I have read an article of some kind which contained a sentence like,** “The first documented use of the term X to denote Y was in 1862, in a letter to the editor etc. etc.”** I never really thought about where such items come from, and who does the research, and where that knowledge is collected.
But now that I am thinking about it, I’m very glad there are people dedicated to that sort of inquiry.
Well, there is another possible resource which might be helpful, though I don’t know too much about it.
Academic linguists compile/maintain/have access to “corpora” . A corpus, in this context, is a database - hopefully, a representative database - of published text, sorted by source, genre, date, etc. There are quite a few of these corpora - e.g. the Corpus of Contemporary American English, maintained by Brigham Young University; the British National Corpus, compiled by the Oxford University Press. BYU maintains a helpful page with links to several corpora: http://corpus.byu.edu/
You can use a corpus, if you know how, to do thing like track the usage of a word or a term in different genres (e.g. literary fiction vs. journalism) or places (US vs. UK) or dates. I suspect that to use it to draw reliable conclusions you need to have a good understanding of how it was compiled, what sources it draws on (and what it ignores), how comprehensive it is, what its strengths and weaknesses are, etc.
The problem in this context is that each corpus is effectively a text database. It will be easy to search for instances of the word “speed” but, I suspect, less easy to filter out those instances which refer to velocity, or any of the many other non-amphetamine-linked senses of the word. And you may have the same problem, possibly to a lesser extent, with “meth”.
And, of course, since it deals with published text, a corpus may be of limited value when researching slang, or the jargon of an informal subculture, which could be an issue here.
These days you can use Google Ngram for a reasonably good search of older terms:
Back in the 90s, IIRC, there was a BBC show called “Balderdash and Piffle”, in which they researched just this type of question. Each episode featured a handful of words, and they tried to track down the earliest usage. At the end of the show, they presented the results to a panel from the OED, who agreed (or didn’t) to accept their evidence. They were also encouraging the general public to chime in with any old papers they had lying around the house. So it seems like the OED would be the best place to start looking.
The OED is great but the Online Etymology Dictionary is more accessible. For meth(n.):
It’s not as good for phrases. For example, when a character on Downton Abbey said something about “sucking up.” Did they really use that phrase back then? Look elsewhere…
Based on this and many previous threads, UDS seems to be He Who Has an OED among us. 
Both samclem and poster Tammi Terrell are known experts who get cited in books and articles.
I want to make sure to acknowledge them even though sam’s being modest. They do a lot of grinding, boring work to get their few nuggets of gold.
To see just how hard this is, look at the ngrams page for meth. Hits all the way back to 1800! But if you check them, they all seem to be abbreviations for Methodist or Methods, or perhaps meth-anol separated by a hyphen to justify the type.
Somebody has to go through all those hundreds of false hits to see if maybe, just maybe, one of them is a true early anomaly popping up. That’s how it’s done. And before Google books and searchable newspaper archives, it was done by reading old things and scanning for individual words. Still is to a degree. Most of the words generated on paper are not yet searchable.