Subject Guides: Find Older Versions of Federal Health-related Websites: Home

About the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a tool that can be used to access earlier versions of websites. What is the Internet Archive?

Enter the url of the website or project, or keywords that would be on its home page, into the search box:

Please note that many websites changed protocols from http to https during the mid-2010s, which may affect Wayback Machine search results

Click on one of the black bars in a previous time, choose a highlighted date from the calendar view, and you can open a past version of that website.

For more detailed instructions see the video below

Websites that have been indexed on the Wayback Machine often include file attachments, but that's not a guarantee.

Here are some example datasets and websites that have been preserved through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System 2023 survey data and documentation Survey data from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
Centers for Disease Control Stored webpages for cdc.gov from 1996 to present
Ending Structural Racism website website published by the National Institutes of Health
LGBTQ+ people's rights in health care Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights for LGBTQ+ in health care
PSNet: Patient Safety Network News and resources for patient safety from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office website part of National Institutes of Health
Women's Health Equity & Inclusion website published by the National Institutes of Health
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System Data and Documentation research project of the Centers for Disease Control

When federal websites are restored, you can use the Wayback Machine to assess how the language of the website or its structure have changed.

Cleveland Clinic Executive Orders Toolkit Guide to federal government changes and orders. Updated frequently.

A number of other projects are working to capture and preserve federal health and science data for the public.

CDC Dataset Preservation An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.
Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool Copy of the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool preserved by the Environment Data & Governance Initiative
Data.gov archive Archive of data.gov, The Home of the U.S. Government's Open Data, on Source Cooperative. Maintained by Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab
Data Liberation Project Preserves government databases and datasets
End of Term Archive End of Term Web Archive preserves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.
Harvard Dataverse Free and open data repository hosted by Harvard University
National Institutes of Health Archive An archive of the websites of the National Insitutes of Health created through the Internet Archive
Public Environmental Data Project Preserves access to federal environmental data

Data Vault public-data preservation software Github repo of open source software used for public data preservation from Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory. May not work out of the box, but can be referenced and built upon for local data-preservation workflows
Save Pages in the Wayback Machine Wayback Machine: Save web pages that are important for preservation