FOIA Request for e-mails about NARA's public-private digitization partnership program

To Whom It May Concern:

This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

I represent a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called Reclaim The Records. We are an activist group of genealogists, historians, journalists, and open government advocates. We acquire genealogical and historical data sets and images from government sources, often through the use of Freedom of Information laws. We then upload those records to the Internet, making them freely available to the public and returning them to the public domain.

We hereby request copies of all of the e-mails, and all of their attachments, sent to e-mail accounts at @nara.gov from accounts at the domains @ancestry.com, @archives.com, @fold3.com, @familysearch.org, and @dar.org, as well as all e-mails and their attachments from @nara.gov accounts to any of those same domains. We request these materials between the dates of January 1, 2013 to the present, meaning the date that NARA starts to process this FOIA request.

We request that these files be turned over to us in their original digital format. We would like to receive them on a portable USB drive, and we are willing to pay the costs for purchasing that drive and for its insured and trackable domestic shipping, as well as any fees associated with fulfilling this request. Please inform us of all fees in advance of fulfilling our order.

We also request to be treated as a "media requester" for the purposes of calculating the fees for this FOIA request. We are a non-profit organization, not a commercial entity. We do not charge for copies of any of the tens of millions of records we have already acquired from government agencies and released to the public. We are one of the largest open records organizations in the United States. As of October 1, 2020, our e-mail newsletter, which has been published several times a year for the past six years, now has a circulation of over 7,500 subscribers. Our social media outlets such as our Facebook page have more than 11,000 followers, and our Twitter account has more than 6,100 followers.

We have even created several free standalone websites to both disseminate and discuss the data that we receive from government entities. As just one example, please see our website https://www.MissouriDeathIndex.com/ and our multiple associated newsletter issues linked from that website. We don't just release data sets, we discuss them too, using our editorial skills and discretion, and then disseminate those discussions to our readers.

Therefore, under 45 CFR 1602.2, we believe that we properly meet the legal qualifications as a "media requester" entity, and so we would need to pay only any duplication fees after the first 100 pages of material, and we should not need to pay any search fees or review fees.

Thank you for your consideration, and we look forward to your timely response within twenty business days, as the statute requires.

sincerely yours,

Brooke Schreier Ganz, on behalf of Reclaim The Records
info@reclaimtherecords.org
https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/