Developments in U.S. federal government information : Archives of government websites

Wayback Machine 

• Description from Ori O’Malley’s Searching 101 libguide:  “a digital archive created and run by the Internet Archive Organization, that allows users to travel "back to the past" to see what a website used to look like at a specified date. The Wayback Machine preserves older versions of and/or decommissioned webpages to help retain access for future generations."
• Started saving websites in 1995 and as of 2025 has stored about 946 billion web pages.
• From the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more. 
• Help with using the Wayback Machine
  • Searching 101: How to Use the Wayback Machine
    • By Ori O’Malley at the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Walter Schroeder Library
  • Internet Archive’s Using the Wayback Machine page
    • Includes a 21-minute YouTube video from 2021 that provides a lot of great info.

Tracking Government Information project

• “[tracks] actions by the current administration that impact government information, such as: removed or modified documents and websites; language censorship; suspension or elimination of agencies, program, funding, or services; and collection of government data.” 
• Opportunities for public participation!  Members of the public can submit information about electronic documents or resources they think have been altered or removed.
• The project’s Government Information Tracker (GIT) tool allows you to see information about each document/resource that has been submitted, including, when available, a link to the archived document/resource.

End of Term (EOT) Web Archive

• First crawl was done in 2004, by the National Archives & Records Administration.
• Starting in 2008, at the end of every presidential term, the work of capturing and archiving U.S. Government websites has been done by the End of Term Web Archive Project.
  • Made up of different partners over the years, including, at times, the Library of Congress, California Digital Library, and Government Publishing Office.  
  • Currently, the partners are all either universities or non-governmental organizations.
• People (including government information library workers) are encouraged to nominate web sites or pages they think should be crawled.
• You can retrieve pages using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

FDLP Web Archive 

• From the Government Publishing Office. 
• Started in late 2011.  
• The Federal Depository Library Program harvests selected U.S. Government Web sites in their entirety.
• Access to these sites is made available through links in GPO’s Catalog of U. S. Government Publications.
• GPO harvests and archives the websites with Archive-It, a subscription-based Web harvesting and archiving service from the Internet Archive. 
   

As part of the Federal Depository Library Program, the UW-Madison Libraries make U.S. government publications available to the public at no fee.

See the guide U.S. Government Publications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for more information on finding U.S. government publications.