The FOIA Ombudsman

  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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s common wisdom in the library and information science community that if you have something and you can’t find it, you don’t have it. This principle is as true for agencies’ records as it is in university libraries, and it directly affects the efficiency and effectiveness of agency FOIA programs. We’ve written before about President [...]

Note: This year’s International Right to Know Day is September 28, 2012. OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet marks the day with the following post about a recent meeting with right-to-know advocates from around the globe. Last month, I had the opportunity to participate in several events Down Under, where the talk was all about access to [...]

By the end of the decade, Federal agencies must digitize management of electronic records—including the millions of emails sent and received each year—according to a new records directive introduced last week. With a focus on a digital transition, the Managing Government Records Directive issued jointly by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the [...]

Documents declassified by the government’s highest classification authority will soon be posted online in a new government declassification portal, a Federal declassification expert said at a July 25, 2012 FOIA Requester Roundtable. William C. Carpenter of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) at the National Archives provided tips on a variety of declassification issues and [...]

For the past two years, the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA’s) Open Government Plan has provided our parent agency with a roadmap to increased transparency, participation and collaboration. Since that time, NARA’s leadership and staff have completed almost 70 tasks spelled out in that document. Never an agency to rest on its laurels, NARA [...]