Internet Archive of Government Websites
Brought to you by a partnership between the Maryland State Archives and Archive-It.org, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded to create an Internet library.
The partnership began in 2011 capturing Maryland state and local government websites as "slices in time". This fully-searchable site provides access to websites and government reports and publications that may no longer exist on current live sites.
Enter a search query below to find a collection, site, specific URL or to search the text of an archived webpages. FAQs.
Browse Collections
Constitutional Offices and Agencies
This collection encompasses websites relating to Maryland’s executive branch, including the governor, lt. governor, attorney general, comptroller, and state treasurer. Social media sites associated with these offices are also archived here.
Departments
There are twenty departments operating within the executive branch. This collection consists of each department’s primary website as well as any affiliated social media sites.
Independent Agencies
Websites in this collection relate to the various offices, commissions, boards, departments, and other agencies of state government established as independent units of government.
Legislative Branch
This collection archives the Maryland General Assembly website which provides access to House and Senate proceedings, bills, and session information.
Judicial Branch
The central website for Maryland’s Judicial Branch offers a wealth of information regarding the state’s circuit and district courts, as well as the Court of Appeals and Court of Special Appeals.
Intercounty and Regional Agencies
Agencies represented in this collection are those responsible for helping local governments to join together in solving regional problems.
Counties
Maryland is divided into twenty-four local jurisdictions: twenty-three counties plus Baltimore City. This collection focuses on archiving the local government websites for each county.
Municipalities
Archiving local government websites at the municipal level provides a look into the daily life of cities and towns across Maryland. Of the 157 municipalities in the state, 129 have websites.
FAQ's
What is the Maryland State Archives' Website Archive?
As the historical agency for Maryland, the State Archives is the depository for records of permanent value. Today, the Internet is the public face of government. Through a partnership with Archive-It, we hope to capture, preserve, and make accessible important state and local government laws, publications, and information.
What is the scope of the Website Archive?
Our focus is on state and local government websites. The web crawler provided by Archive-It captures most webpages, documents, images, pdfs, audio and video found on the particular domains designated by the State Archives to be crawled.
What is Archive-It?
Archive-It is a subscription service that allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. As a partner of Archive-It, the Maryland State Archives is given the tools necessary to harvest, catalog, and manage our archived collections. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center and are accessible to the public with full-text search.
What is the Wayback Machine?
The Wayback Machine is owned and operated by the Internet Archive. Archive-It uses the Wayback Machine as the interface through which users can visit archived websites that may no longer exist or revisit older versions of current live sites. The Wayback Machine can be searched using URLs and date ranges.
How far back can I search Maryland government websites?
The Maryland State Archives began archiving state and local government websites in March 2011. However, if you know the exact URL of the website you are interested in, you can go to the Internet Archive and search the Wayback Machine as far back as 1996.
How often does the Maryland State Archives archive a website?
Currently, the frequency of web crawls is every two months. On occasion, if there has been a major change in a website, e.g. after a change in an agency's administration, we may perform a one-time capture of that site.
How do I search the Maryland State Archives' website collections?
Our collections are full-text searchable using the search box above or by visiting our partner page on archive-it.org.
How can I tell if I am viewing an archived site or the live site?
Archived web pages look slightly different from "live" sites. Archived pages contain a yellow banner at the top which includes the date that particular version of the site was crawled and archived. The URL of an archived site also looks different, for example: http://wayback.archive-it.org/2458/20111201145244/http://www.mdcourts.gov/.
Why do some archived sites appear incomplete or have broken links?
There are some limitations to the Heritrix crawler used by Archive-It. Certain sites that are database-driven, involve searches or drop-down menus, requiring user input, are not able to be crawled at this time. Other common aspects of websites make archiving their content difficult and may result in incomplete rendering of the archived site or messages that some content has not been archived. These include, in part, robots.txt files, Javascript menus, and links to external Web sites that are not part of a particular archival collection.
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