HA
HealthArchive.caIndependent archive of Canadian public health information

For researchers

Using HealthArchive.ca for research and analysis

This project is being designed so that epidemiologists, health services researchers, policy analysts, and data journalists can reliably reconstruct what Canadian public health sites showed at specific points in time.

Examples of research use cases

  • Policy and guideline history: Tracking how public health guidance on topics such as COVID-19 vaccination, seasonal influenza, or naloxone distribution has changed over time.
  • Reproducibility of analyses: Linking analytic work to the exact wording and tables visible on a given date, rather than relying on whatever the current version of a page shows.
  • Media and communication studies: Examining how risk communication, disclaimers, or focus on specific populations evolved across different periods.
  • Audit and accountability: Comparing archived content with later messaging to understand shifts in emphasis, framing, or scope.

Working with the demo archive

The current demo offers a deliberately small, hand-curated dataset. It's meant to illustrate how a future research-grade interface could behave rather than to serve as a full corpus.

  • A small set of example records from federal health sites (e.g., PHAC, Health Canada).
  • A search interface that filters records by keywords, source, and topic.
  • A “browse by source” view summarizing which demo records exist for each agency.
  • HTML snapshot stubs that stand in for real archived pages and show how replay URLs will be structured.

In the live system, these demo components would be replaced by a real index and replay service backed by WARC files and dedicated storage.

Citing HealthArchive.ca

Until formal citation guidance is published, a pragmatic format for referencing an archived page from HealthArchive.ca is:

HealthArchive.ca Project. “<Page title>” (snapshot from < capture date>). Archived copy of <original agency> web page (<original URL>). Accessed <access date>. Available from: <HealthArchive.ca archived URL>.

For example, for a COVID-19 epidemiology update snapshot:

HealthArchive.ca Project. “COVID-19 epidemiology update: Canada” (snapshot from 15 Feb 2025). Archived copy of Public Health Agency of Canada web page (https://www.canada.ca/...). Accessed 3 Dec 2025. Available from: https://healtharchive.ca/snapshot/phac-2025-02-15-covid-epi.

Planned researcher-focused capabilities (not yet implemented)

  • Snapshot-level version history for individual URLs, exposing a timeline of captures for each page.
  • Side-by-side comparison views to highlight textual changes between two archived snapshots.
  • Machine-readable exports describing changes over time for selected URLs or topics.
  • Lightweight APIs for programmatic querying of snapshot metadata, with rate limits and sustainability in mind.