The latest release of DocumentCloud introduces OCR injection, ensuring that OCR’d text from Textract or any Add-Ons is grafted into the underlying PDF.

The new DocumentCloud is live, featuring a faster, more consistent, and modernized user interface optimized for accessibility and performance. Alongside this, MuckRock is proud to launch version 2 of our MuckRock, offering improved authentication, efficiency, and speed. To support these updates, the new python-squarelet Python library simplifies token management and authentication for both APIs. Additionally, an IPFS/Filecoin Batch Uploader Add-On allows users to upload large document sets more reliably and efficiently.

We’ll be releasing the experience for everyone in mid-November. Keep reading for an in-depth explanation for why we started this project, how we approached it, and how it succeeded.

New changes have been made to both the DocumentCloud and MuckRock APIs, including that and embargoes are now restructured.

DocumentCloud, supported by the Filecoin Foundation, is using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) network and Filecoin to ensure long-term preservation and distribution of documents. IPFS’s decentralized nature enhances censorship resistance and privacy, while Filecoin provides incentives for data storage and sharing. DocumentCloud’s Push to IPFS Add-On facilitates easy integration with IPFS/Filecoin for secure and enduring document access.

The MuckRock team is excited to introduce several new features in our transparency toolkit. Users can now easily search across all public projects, making it simpler to find relevant collections of documents.

Over the past few weeks, the MuckRock tech team has focused on several key updates and additions. These include the development of the Knight Election Hub, which offers vital resources to U.S. newsrooms for comprehensive coverage of the 2024 elections.

Over the last few weeks, we have been hard at work on a range of improvements to MuckRock and DocumentCloud, but FOIA fans have something special to celebrate: We’ve imported many of the requests from FOIAonline into a searchable database which allows you to filter, browse and even re-request almost 170,000 requests with just a few clicks.

DocumentCloud now allows Add-On developers to customize the emails sent when a scheduled run fails, making it easier to understand why something stopped working and potentially fix it. The Regex Extractor Add-On now enables tagging documents when a matching regular expression is found, opening up new ways to sort and filter large document collections with ease.

Since our last release notes, we released a new Add-On OCR Tagger that allows you to tag your document(s) based on the OCR engine used and we added better logging for when scheduled Add-Ons like Klaxon or Scraper get disabled. This helps more easily diagnose and correct outages that impact Add-Ons.