I was greatly flattered by RainJustRain’s shout-out for my project indexing the CDC website’s public-facing website archive a few days ago:
This morning I read the news thinking, “OMG what do we do? What do we do?” And I came across the following story in the comments section of this post on Political Wire:
Before the CDC website was purged of information deemed nasty by the current administration, Daily Kos regular Brainwrap (aka Charles Gaba) downloaded it and posted it at his website acasignups.net
Gotta love Gaba. Way to resist, Brainwrap. Thank you.
I should clarify that I’m hardly the only one doing this type of data/website archiving work, and Niema Moshiri, an associate computer science professor at UCSD, helped me generate the actual index of CDC.gov. The index I posted at ACASignups.net actually consists of links to all ~7,200 of the individual pages archived via the Wayback Machine via the Internet Archive.
Also, the public-facing website is different from CDC.gov’s data sets, which have also been archived by someone else, also via the Internet Archive.
In any event, Prof. Moshiri and I have just completed doing this for a second critical federal healthcare website, FDA.Gov:
With the Musk/Trump Administration bulldozing their way through seemingly every federal government website, teams of data analysts and archivers have been attempting to download and archive as much federal data as possible. In this case, I'm providing direct links to the Internet Archive's most recent mirrored versions of every public-facing web page on the Food & Drug Administration's website (FDA.Gov) prior to content being purged (at least to my knowledge).
For the FDA site, I’ve improved the user interface substantially: Instead of just a bunch of pages with 500 random links apiece, this time I’ve broken the site out into major topics and have whipped up a drop-down menu to make navigation easier.
I hope to convert the CDC website index over to the same format soon as well.
Again, this project is the product of a lot of work by multiple people. If you'd like to support the Internet Archive you can do so here. If you'd like to support my efforts you can do so here, thank you!
