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 [...]

FOIA fees can quickly snarl into knots for agency FOIA professionals and requesters alike. Untangling those knots takes work, but one of the best tools for the task is communication. That’s the central theme that emerged from a recent FOIA Requester Roundtable, sponsored by OGIS and the Office of Information Policy (OIP), Department of Justice [...]

  In its March 29 self-assessment of the National Action Plan, the White House evaluated its progress on the two FOIA-related components of that plan: professionalizing FOIA administration and harnessing the power of technology. During Sunshine Week 2012, the Office of Personnel Management announced the creation of the Government Information Series. This specialized field within [...]

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 [...]

Whew! We at OGIS have caught our breath after a hectic Sunshine Week during which we joined folks from both the agency and requester communities in promoting the importance of open government and freedom of information. (Of course, these values are just as important during the other 51 weeks of the year.) If you weren’t [...]

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.

Those of us in the FOIA and Privacy fields have long desired to “professionalize” the Government information access field. Traditionally, FOIA and Privacy professionals in the Federal government have had no consistent job titles or descriptions and no clear career path; instead, agencies have taken a patchwork approach, squeezing FOIA and Privacy professionals into sometimes [...]

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 [...]

  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 [...]