director nesbit. >> thank you. miriam nesbit. office of government services. i'm going to go back to the logs. earlier there's been a little bit of discussion about the foia portal that -- a project that's currently under construction. one important feature of that is tracking that directly brings in every single data point that are agencies are required to make in their annual foia reports. and that tracking process would be available to any agency that participated. certainly that would be a good feature in terms of consistency, coherence and also having data in one place that could be available not only to congress, to the agencies, to the public but just would really help particularly those agency that right now -- in fact, that's one reason commerce was so interested in participating is because they know they don't have the proper tracking ability, you know, in every component of commerce. so i think that's going to be a real helpful feature. >> is there anything commerce can do toin courage use of the portal since it is voluntary? members, for example, w

first merriam nesbit, known to everyone here in the audience, i'm sure, and hopefully more and more people out in the viewing audience. as the -- i can't say new director. our the founding director of the office of information services, been in existence since september of 2009. so it's been two-and-a-half years. and it either feels like it's been ten years or only four weeks. depending upon probably one day to the next. within the office of government information services. ogis for short, just like foya for short. and merriam is someone who came back from paris, to her husband's, dismay, to accept that senior executive service position. >> he was with me. >> oh, i'm not implying a break-up. as a matter of fact, i saw him back here in washington. but my -- made it very clear to me that had you turned that job down and allowed him to stay as a kept man in paris, france for the near future, that would have been fine with him. fair characterization. >> quite. >> anything beyond that is -- if i go a half step further, it will become 7c investigation, because merriam will come after me and ther

marianne nesbit will testify about work foia is doing including with the epa and department of commerce, which we're very interested in, which would allow requesters to submit their requests to multiple agencies at a single portal and then also this is what is most exciting for suss that they would be able to see previously requested and released material. so that would be a source for them to see what other agencies have produced in response to other foias.wehink that's a ver tool to the public and something the agencies should be doing more of. it's a requirement under the electronic foia act of 1996. a lot of agencies are doing a good job in meeting that but some agencies, frankly, are not posting all of the records that they should be on their online reading rooms. one problem is that e-foia specifies frequently requested records must be posed but there's no definition of frequent. so some agencies comply to doj's guidance with a rule of three and others do not. there's no real consistent format. that's something we would like to recommend agencies do more of, pro active disclosure