The FOIA Ombudsman

On May 13, 2013 the American Society of Access Professionals (ASAP) presented OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet with the President’s Award for Distinguished Public Service, ASAP’s highest honor. ASAP also gave the Director’s Award for Superior Public Service to the National Archives’ own Public Interest Declassification Board. Congratulations, Miriam and PIDB — we are so proud [...]

Composing a successful FOIA request can be tricky. Agencies are responsible for a mind-boggling amount of information, and finding a record amid years and years of accumulated documents can feel like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack (though some requesters and agency professionals would probably argue that the haystack searcher’s task is the [...]

Are you a FOIA professional who is interested in learning more about how to resolve disputes that may arise in the FOIA process? If so, please join OGIS for Dispute Resolution Training for FOIA Professionals on Wednesday, May 1. This free all-day session (9:00 a.m. – 4 p.m.) will be held at the main Archives [...]

The issue of fees can trip up even the most experienced requester and FOIA professional. We all know that it is a tricky issue, but might there be a better way? In our 2013 recommendations, we laid out our plan to discuss the issue of fees and fee waivers with the requester and agency communities; [...]

FOIA is everyone’s responsibility. This is a common refrain for FOIA processors and records managers, but we have observed that it can be a challenge to impress upon those outside the FOIA department that FOIA is their job, too. For those who don’t live and breathe FOIA, having a cumbersome, time-sensitive project like a FOIA [...]

Sunshine Week 2013 was so bright, it just keeps on shining. Last week’s post brought you up to speed on many of OGIS’s Sunshine Week 2013 activities, but one event was absent – the Sixth Annual Freedom of Information Day Celebration, hosted by American University Washington College of Law’s Collaboration on Government Secrecy. This event [...]

We are pleased to share OGIS’s 2012 report, Office of Government Information Services: Building a Bridge Between FOIA Requesters & Federal Agencies. We hope that you will read about our accomplishments over the past year and our thoughts for the coming year. Please email us with your thoughts and feedback.

OGIS will celebrate Sunshine Week along with the National Archives, our parent agency, with two back-to-back events at the National Archives on Monday, March 11, 2013: A display of the original FOIA with remarks by Archivist of the United States David Ferriero and OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet A demonstration of FOIAonline, the multi-agency FOIA portal [...]

A few of us from OGIS recently attended a presentation by the Interagency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group, an organization for Federal employees who work in the area of alternative dispute resolution. The title of the presentation was “How an Ombuds Office Serving Employees, Customers, and Citizens Can Bring Greater Success to Your Agency.” The [...]

  Editor’s note: This guest post is from Wendy Schumacher, Ph.D., PMP. Wendy, thank you for sharing your story. I started my job as the FOIA Officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about a year after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. My new colleagues had collected, organized, reviewed, redacted and [...]