Reclaim the Records “mother-of-all-FOIA requests” and NARA’s new digitization partnership site

An activist group called Reclaim the Records recently submitted the “mother-of-all-FOIA requests” asking for billions of pages scanned through NARA’s public-private digitization partnership program. Here’s the twitter thread describing it:

Hey! @USNatArchives just did something new, and really good for transparency!

And we think it maybe *might* be because of that "mother-of-all-FOIA requests" we just filed with them. 😌

So, okay, remember how we filed this on October 14th? Well…
1/https://t.co/zkhudYswJy

— Reclaim The Records (@ReclaimTheRecs) November 19, 2020

Well now at least NARA has put up a page showing all of their digitization partners and what publications/record groups these organizations are scanning. It looks mostly to be ancestry, fold3 and familysearch, but there are other groups like the National Archives of Korea, National Collection of Aerial Photography (UK), and NOAA (Logbooks from 19th century naval ships and expeditions!).

From what I can tell, these scans seem to be going into NARA’s catalog and are freely available! Thanks NARA and also BIG thanks Reclaim the Records for making a big public deal about NARA’s public-private partnership program and making sure that the public is aware of those BILLIONS of scanned pages.

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