This website is dedicated to something that I will call “the art of information access," a term that refers to the practices involved in gaining access to government-held documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States.
Speaking broadly as an anthropologist,
I will describe the “culture of FOIA,” but not from the perspective
of what makes a FOIA requestor tick or how FOIA requestors share a culture
distinct from the rest of us.
Instead, I will depict FOIA requestors from a cultural perspective by describing
both what they do and the kinds of things they are conscious of to which
most people are unaware. As a point of comparison, think of people who collect
things like baseball cards or rocks. Or think of people who watch for things
like birdwatchers or astronomers. These people are all collectors of some
sort. But while everybody knows a bird or a baseball card when they see
it, you need to be an expert to know the difference between a comet and
a piece of space junk floating across the sky. The difference between a
novice and a successful professional is not simply a quantitative difference
in the amount of knowledge owned by the expert, but a qualitative difference
in the way that the expert sees, knows what to look for, and knows where
to find things.
For better or worse, you need to be something of a FOIA expert to successfully
utilize FOIA. That is not only because you need to acquaint yourself with
the elaborate wordings and processes of the language of the law, but because
you need to know how to envision a FOIA request, what to be aware of, and
where to look for clues to help you make a successful request.
How-to FOIA websites are good at doing this and I have collected a list full of links to websites that have directly or tangentially aided me in my quest to understand FOIA. Many of them are geared towards special types of requestors. The fundamental difference between those sites and mine is in this sensitivity towards the learning process involved, an understanding of the ways that FOIA experts see things differently, and, in the end, a valuable analytic tool to think about our information situation today. Because while I will refer to what I describe as the “culture of FOIA,” this is not a culture in the traditional sense of an all-consuming worldview. Understanding the art of information access is an exercise in becoming conscious of the importance of information, records, archives, and access in the political environment of the Information Age. As such, it is an invaluable tool—even if, I daresay, you never intend to make a FOIA request.
For those of you interested in the justifications for FOIA and, more generally, freedom of information and the right to know, I have compiled a list of arguments for openness in an attempt to understand the shared logic of FOIA requestors.