We recently posted news of Carl Malamud's effort to make access to the federal court records contained in the PACER system available at no cost to the general public (here's our previous post on how he and a few colleagues downloaded 20 million pages from PACER.) Now comes news that the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University has created a PACER Firefox add-on called RECAP. RECAP automatically stores user search results generated in PACER. As registered PACER users download the records for a fee, RECAP creates and stores a copy that will later be available free.
The update on Carl Malamud: He recently spoke at the Gov 2.0 Summit and is still actively involved in making public records more accessible and inexpensive.