Group Files 'Largest FOIA of All Time'

guest · Oct 17, 2020

Group Files 'Largest FOIA of All Time'
The request is for billions of of digital images and historical records hidden behind arbitrary paywalls
October 16, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aqa8/group-files-largest-foia-of-all-time

Reclaim the Records—a group of activist genealogists, historians, journalists, teachers—has filed what may be the largest Freedom Of Information Act Request of all time. The group wants the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to release billions of digital images and their associated metadata to the public.

NARA is a government agency that preserves and archives the American government’s historical records. It’s also supposed to increase public access to those records. To accomplish that goal, NARA partnered with private companies such as genealogical website Ancestory.com to digitize and upload census records, immigration records, and other historical documents.
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According to the agreements, the sites were supposed to open up their digitized archive to the public after an exclusivity period of 3 - 5 years. “In practice, this simply hasn’t happened,” Reclaim the Records said in a blog post announcing the FOIA.

“NARA has never actually posted online the vast majority of these records that were digitized through their partnership program, not to their Catalog nor indeed anywhere else where the public might be able to freely access and download the now-digital records. [...]”

Most of these are stored behind Ancestry.com’s paywall, in part because Ancestry purchased several of the other sites that NARA had made deals with when they were still independent.
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Reclaim the Records has asked that NARA release all the records it made in partnership with private companies in their digitized, uncompressed, non-watermarked form.

To facilitate the transfer, Reclaim the Records had said it’s willing to pay for USB drives and the cost of shipping them. It said it would also take digital copies of the records moved from NARA’s Amazon Web Services server to Reclaim the Records Amazon Web Services server.
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