Each day, people seeking records about themselves use the FOIA process to obtain their records as they navigate health care, employment, immigration, law enforcement or other issues that intersect in some way with the federal government. A government-wide look at what are known as “first-party requests” shows that the records requesters seek about themselves fall … Continue reading OGIS Publishes Issue Assessment on First-party Requests
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/4492629 While you may not be familiar with the term “enterprise search,” those who have recently submitted a broad FOIA request for email records are likely to be familiar with the challenges agencies face in conducting records searches across vast electronic repositories. On May 6, 2021, OGIS hosted a webinar with Centers for Disease Control … Continue reading Recap: Recent OGIS/CDC Webinar on Enterprise Searching
Main Reading Room, Helsinki Information Library(National Archives ID: 23932377) This post was written by Meredith Doviak, Community Manager of the National Archives Catalog, who conducted this assessment on temporary assignment to OGIS as part of a National Archives and Records Administration Cross-training Program. OGIS is pleased to announce our latest issue assessment examining the methods … Continue reading OGIS Publishes Assessment on Posting to FOIA Websites
The following post is written by Meredith Doviak, our National Archives colleague who is helping us assess methods agencies use to prepare documents for posting on agency FOIA reading rooms. In the decades since Congress amended FOIA in 1996 to expand the role of the agency FOIA reading room, the expectations and use of Federal … Continue reading Assessing FOIA Reading Rooms
Quick FOIA quiz: Is the White House subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)? Yes. And no. It depends on the function of a particular White House office. Offices within the Executive Office of the President that “wield … substantial authority independent of the President” are subject to FOIA, the Court of Appeals for … Continue reading The 411 on FOIA & the White House
Repeat OGIS customers may wonder why we sometimes ask them to provide consent to discuss their requests with agencies and other times we don’t. We recently contacted a requester whose consent we had asked for a few weeks earlier and told her, in essence: just kidding, we really don’t need your consent. So why … Continue reading Providing Consent
We get many requests for assistance related to FOIA Exemption 4, which protects from disclosure commercial and financial information provided to the government. For example, over the last few months we have heard from requesters frustrated about delays related to submitter notice and an agency interested in brainstorming how best to communicate with the entities … Continue reading Throwback Thursday: Thinking about Exemption 4
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 … Continue reading The Business of Search
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 … Continue reading Untangling Fees
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.
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