Yesterday, the White House released a directive with instructions and deadlines for executive departments and agencies for implementing the goals set forth in President Obama's January 21 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. It lists specific plans to be completed in time frames ranging from 45 to 120 days.

Today's New York Times includes an in interesting article discussing how municipal governments are starting to release obscure public records datasets to Internet and software developers. These programmers are finding new applications for the data, and creating websites that make the information more useable and interesting to the general population.

When responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, sometimes agencies provide unsatisfactory or untimely responses. In such cases, start by evaluating the basis of the denial and then move toward making an appeal of the agency determination.

We recently posted news of Carl Malamud's effort to make access to the federal court records contained in the PACER system available at no cost to the general public. Now comes news that the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University has created a PACER Firefox add-on called RECAP.

Google recently announced that its Caffeine search upgrade will be activated following several months of user testing.

Microsoft Bing will now offer search features specifically derived from recent Twitter and Facebook status updates. With Twitter and Facebook becoming commonly used by politicians and other public figures to communicate with the public, these new search features provide better tools for researching their past statements.

Government agencies commonly charge reasonable fees to reproduce public records as necessary to cover their copy costs and search time. But what happens when these costs are prohibitively expensive? Santa Clara County recently paid a $500,000 settlement for legal fees after fighting a First Amendment Coalition lawsuit which challenged the excessive prices the county charged for Geographic Information System (GIS) maps.

Restaurants' food safety inspection reports, required to be conducted at least once a year in most states, have always been available via a public records request to city or county health departments. However, they are becoming more readily available and searchable online.

The Sacramento Bee recently published a database of gifts given to California politicians by synthesizing information from publicly available records, including elected officials' financial disclosure filings and lobbyists' disclosure reports.

Using a variety of existing public records resources and online databases together with supplementary written FOIA requests, the New York Times created a national database of water pollution violations and associated penalties.

To meet demands for transparency, more government agencies are publishing their public records online. These records have always been available with a written FOIA request, yet their easier online accessibility sometimes meets with resistance from interested parties.

Credit reports are not public records, but employers wishing to vet job candidates for high profile positions may seek consent of a candidate to review their credit record. Provided the employer follows the guidelines set forth by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), they may use this information to look at the candidate's personal financial history as a reflection of money management skills.