Published on Free Government Information (FGI) (http://www.freegovinfo.info)

GovernmentDocs.org provides enhanced access to FOIA documents

By jajacobs
Created 2007-12-29 20:01

Back in November, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, along with Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation launched a new website,  GovernmentDocs.org [1], which will house governmetn documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. From the press release [2]:

The database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind.

Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that:

 


Source URL:
http://www.freegovinfo.info/node/1544