OGIS: New FOIA dispute agency begins to grow

As the Office of Government Information Services approaches its five month anniversary, its new director held her first news conference to talk about progress in growing the new agency.

In a briefing held at National Archives headquarters in downtown DC, OGIS director Miriam Nisbet talked about a staff so small, she could name each member in the order in which they were hired, starting with herself, onboard since last September.

"I've been busy the last several months hiring staff. We're about to add our sixth staff member in a few weeks, and we're trying to get going to do what the law says we're supposed to do."

Nisbet says there are "two prongs" to the OGIS mission as defined in the amended Freedom of Information Act approved by Congress nearly three years ago:

One has to do with agencies and how they are complying with the law, and making recommendations for changes, both procedural and policy-wise, and making recommendations to the Congress and the President on how things can be done better. The second prong has to do, for the first time, with mediation to resolve disputes between FOIA requesters and government agencies.

Nisbet, a lawyer well known for her work in the open government community, says the hope is that OGIS's efforts will serve to reduce the amount of costly litigation that results when citizens and groups don't get the information they need from federal agencies.

One of the items at the top of Nisbet's "to do" list right now is working with National Archives contracting staff to acquire, "an electronic case tracking system. What we are hoping to have in place in a few months... is a system that can generate reports, but can also provide information on the web."

She says the goal would be to have a fully-digital system that would allow a FOIA requester to self-track the status of their request, in much the same way that people and companies who ship via UPS have their own tracking number allowing them to follow the progress of their packages on a website.

Nisbet says one category of FOIA requests that her office is not tackling right away are those dealing with classified documents. That's because there are efforts happening elsewhere in the National Archives to set up the National Declassification Center, which has been tasked with eliminating the backlog of more than 400 million documents waiting to be declassified, and made available to the public.

Nisbet told Federal News Radio it's too soon yet to determine if her office has the resources to do the job. She does say that another of her goals for OGIS is to become a FOIA resource for agencies as well, in which the office would track "good practices" among agencies in handling FOIA requests, and provide a means for sharing that information.

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