Best way to archive CDC website?
January 31, 2025 11:54 AM   Subscribe

According to Ryan Broderick, An employee working for an agency funded by federal grants working in HIV care told Garbage Day that their manager said the CDC website is expected to come down "in its entirety" and "to save what they might need." Targethiv.org, run by the Health Resources and Services Administration, is already down. And as of January 29th, a security measure was put in place blocking the archiving of targethiv.org.

The employee stressed that they were told it wasn’t just HIV resources that were being impacted, but the entire site. There are already reports of various landing pages and directories on the CDC website going down and we’ve verified that all the content on the site pertaining to youth health services is gone. The CDC website has already been targeted by “anti-DEI” executive orders and, according to Stat News, datasets concerning sexual orientation and the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index are already down. There is a Google Form being used by health professionals and journalists circulating as a way to coordinate the archiving of the CDC’s data, which you can find here.

So given the above, what is the best way to help share this information?
posted by Bella Donna to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
There has been an ongoing archiving effort, I know there's at least a handful of mefites involved who can hopefully come explain better and give some guidance on what existing campaigns are underway rather than reinventing wheels or spending time on data that's already secured.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:56 AM on January 31 [2 favorites]


There's an existing, on-going project called the End of Term Archive done by government information librarians.

There's also the wayback machine. Today I was able to find on the wayback machine a page on LGBT youth no longer accessible on the CDC website.
Health Disparities Among LGBTQ Youth on the CDC website
Health Disparities Among LGBTQ Youth on Jan 17 via the wayback machine
posted by bluedaisy at 12:04 PM on January 31 [8 favorites]


I just posted a Bluesky thread on how to think about public data archiving generally. There are a number of efforts underway to archive public data, including ours, but it's a large government and a small community. I would think more in terms of "learn to make a copy of something you want a copy of" than worrying about duplicating effort. Using ArchiveWeb.page to download a complicated site (say, one that would be hard for Google to crawl) is a good approach.
posted by john hadron collider at 1:31 PM on January 31 [2 favorites]




john hadron collider, I wonder if that information isn't worth a blue post?
posted by Glinn at 3:08 PM on January 31 [5 favorites]


The big problem is not the pages. It's the datasets. Datasets going back decades are vanishing. People didn't seem to expect this, from the reactions I'm seeing in the public health community.
posted by rednikki at 11:41 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]


Here's something that just came across my listservs today: The Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab Team is another initiative that is preserving datasets and other relevant documents. "This effort, focusing on datasets rather than web archives, collects and will make available hundreds of thousands of government datasets that researchers depend on."
posted by LKWorking at 11:42 AM on February 3 [2 favorites]


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