The National Archives appointed a veteran open government advocate Wednesday to be the first Freedom of Information Act ombudsman, empowered to mediate disputes between people who request data and the agencies that have it.
Miriam Nisbet, who now heads the information society division of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, was chosen to direct the Archives' new Office of Government Information Services, acting Archivist Adrienne Thomas announced....
Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of nine media groups, including The Associated Press...said Nisbet "is a longtime advocate for open government, and this is a promising start for those who want the FOIA to work better."
Thomas said Nisbet "has dedicated her entire professional life to working for open access to government records." ...
Nisbet's U.N. office supports libraries and archives in developing countries and promotes new communication technologies for education, science and culture. Before joining the U.N. in 2007, she was legislative counsel of the American Library Association. In the mid-1990s, she was special counsel for information policy at the National Archives. And from 1982 to 1994, she was deputy director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, which decided which department documents could be released under FOIA and the Privacy Act and provided guidance to the entire federal government on how to implement FOIA.
The FOIA ombudsman's office was created by the OPEN Government Act of 2007. Besides mediating disputes, it is authorized to review how well agenc[ies] comply with the act and recommend policy changes to the president and Congress.
Comment. I got to know Miriam when she was legislative counsel for the ALA and an active and effective member of the Open Access Working Group. See for example her defense of the proposed OA mandate in the CURES Act of 2005. She's a superb choice to carry out the presumption in favor of disclosure that President Obama announced in his memo on the FOIA his first full day in office. (Congratulations, Miriam!)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/10/2009 09:04:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
