FOIA drop-box

A tweet from John Wonderlich (from the fabulously cool Open House Project!) yesterday got me thinking. He posted about submitting his first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. I'm not sure what the request entails, but my thought was that it'd be cool if there was somewhere on the net that folks who got documents via a FOIA request could submit copies of both the request and the documents.

Now maybe there already is, although I don't think the Memory Hole does this (hey Russ Kick, is MH defunct? I don't see any new content since Oct 2006!). My library is already gobbling up and preserving the FOIA reading rooms, but I don't have any sense about how many FOIA request documents make it into those agency sites. Does anyone have an answer to that?

So, if you've got any FOIA documents laying around your hard drive, send them over to FGI at admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. We'll post them on this site and on the Internet Archive's US Government Documents collection. We'll make sure they get on the 'net and get preserved for long-term access!

No votes yet

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Great Idea

Offering to be a FOIA dropbox is a great idea. Thanks for thinking of it!

------------------------------------
"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.

FOIA collections

Thanks Daniel. I've kicked around the idea of a FOIA digital collection for a while and with several others (Jim Jacobs and Elliot Kanter at UCSD library especially). So it's cool that I can use the archive-it service to harvest those documents that federal agencies have put up. I'd appreciate if readers would look at the list of sites in the FOIA collection and send me sites that I've missed. Additionally, does anyone know the federal policy on posting FOIA documents to agency FOIA reading rooms?

FOIA Collection-Kudos

Great idea! Because not everything is archived by the FAS. ;-) I find so much through their website...

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see <a href="/interwiki/3">interwiki</a>.

More information about formatting options

Captcha
This question is used to make sure you are a human visitor and to prevent spam submissions.
Syndicate content