Office of Government Information Services (OGIS)

FOIA Logs Question for FOIA Advisory Committee

Listening in on the April 2, 2026 committee meeting regarding FOIA logs. Do we know how DOJ will post FOIA logs?  That could drive the required format. Saying machine readable leaves it to the agencies to figure out which could cause conflict when DOJ then decides a specific format for auto ingestion like the annual report data in xml format. I suggest a specific format is provided similar to the DOJ reporting requirements depending on how DOJ decides to post and use the data.  If the files will just be posted in a FOIA.gov reading room in a format the public can download and use as they desire and not ingested into FOIA.gov then defining the format would provide consistency for the public so they don’t have to get access to different apps to view or work with the data. Also EXCEL is a Microsoft app that costs money but there are read only free solutions for MS products and since csv format files are opened with the same excel viewers there should be no issue. 
Happy to discuss in more detail from the view of a FOIA request management solution provider.

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