When most people think about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests being utilized to expose wrongdoing in government, they think of journalists exposing corruption, discrimination or waste. However, there are many different types of organizations that utilize FOIA to hold government agencies accountable, including educational institutions. In this blog, we discuss a recent lawsuit filed by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Oregon School of Law against the California prison system in an attempt to access race and ethnicity data for parole applicants.

The federal government is currently revising its FOIA Fee Guidelines, which dictate how and when federal agencies can charge FOIA fees. In this blog, we discuss some of the changes that government transparency groups are advocating and provide a link for submitting comments. Researchers who have been frustrated by the federal FOIA process might consider submitting comments to OMB to make the federal FOIA process more responsive. 

The recently passed Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security bill, or CARES Act, allocated $669 billion to aid small businesses impacted by the novel coronavirus that has devastated our economy, which has already generated controversy surrounding the distribution of these funds. In this blog, we discuss a new COVID Stimulus Watch website unveiled by the non-profit Good Jobs First to track the distribution of CARES Act funding, as well as to provide a summary of each recipient’s history of regulatory violations, prior government assistance, tax avoidance issues and CEO pay.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision this week that expanded public access to annotated state codes, while ruling that the official work of legislators cannot be copyrighted.  The decision resulted from a case filed by the State of Georgia that claimed copyright protections for annotated versions of the state code.  Our new blog discusses the ruling, which establishes a clear precedent for public access to the work of our elected legislators.

In this blog post, we discuss how fact-checking has evolved to take on an increasingly prominent role in the age of social media, helping determine what qualifies as credible information. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic resulting in widespread anxiety around the country, conditions are ripe for misinformation to spread, which has increasingly put a strain on the fact-checkers responsible for stemming the tide of false conspiracies. In this environment of incomplete information, it is all the more important to view new information with a critical eye and, when necessary, consult the professionals.

The Library of Congress (LOC) is the largest library in the world, with a collection of over 168 million items – from a 19th century glass flute to a lock of Thomas Jefferson’s hair. In fact, the LOC holds several of the world’s largest collections, including the largest collection of cartographic materials (5.6 million items), comic books (more than 140,000 items representing more than 12,000 titles), law library (over 2.9 million volumes) and the most comprehensive collection of American music (over 22 million items, including 8.2 million pieces of sheet music). In this blog, we highlight several interesting resources offered in the LOC’s extensive online collection, including their movie, music and map collections.

As the coronavirus grips our nation, numerous agencies and organizations are turning their attention to helping combat the pandemic, including offering resources to help monitor its spread and tips on combating the virus. In this blog, we’ve provided hyperlinks to different coronavirus resources, including research related to the virus and the various tracking resources.

This blog discusses the recently unveiled news website called The Markup, which is focused on educating consumers about technology products and the companies that misuse technology. The Markup aims to inform readers not just through their in-depth investigative pieces, but also by providing detailed explanations of their work, including source material (i.e. datasets and code) and detailed write-ups on methodology, which could prove useful for researchers.

Our new blog discusses legislation introduced in California this week that would clear the criminal records of approximately 2 million people dating back to 1973 and, in the process, dramatically alter the public records landscape in the state. The legislation would automatically expunge records of certain, eligible arrests and crimes dating back to 1973. Read to learn more about the potential impact on public records researchers.

In this blog, we discuss a recent lawsuit filed by the Marshall Project that shed light on the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, a nonprofit group that has operated for years as stand-in for the Memphis police department. The case highlights the need for researchers to be aware of the network of nonprofits that operate in conjunction with public entities, but without the same disclosure requirements to ensure transparency.