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.

Over the past few weeks, the MuckRock team has been busy with several updates and improvements. The biggest update: Our new Email Archiver Add-On allows you to preserve email files (EML/MBOX) with corresponding metadata for long-term storage by seamlessly converting emails to EA-PDFs, a new archive-friendly standard that preserves email metadata in a consistent way while ensuring emails are consistently preserved as PDFs.

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.

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.

In the last two weeks the MuckRock team released the ability to pin your projects on DocumentCloud, the ability to update your card on file without making a new purchase and several Add-On improvements including two new Add-Ons: OCR Scheduler and Page Counter.

At NICAR 2024, University of Texas students demonstrated their use of DocumentCloud to compile local campaign finance reports, overcoming challenges with the use of enhanced OCR and categorizing their documents with tagging.

We’ve launched several improvements over the last two weeks, including a few new DocumentCloud Add-Ons to help you extract tables from your documents and boosted DocumentCloud search stability. MuckRock’s FOIA Log Explorer now has agency cards, which provide you with more detail about each agency’s logs.

DocumentCloud premium users can now utilize revision control to store document changes and easily retrieve previous versions. The platform’s sidebar has undergone a redesign, while additional improvements include dropdown menu support in Add-Ons and the ability to select which Whisper model you would like to use with the Transcribe Audio Add-On.

DocumentCloud gets a new and improved GPT 3.5 Turbo Add-On; MuckRock and Accounts get more concise 403 pages; a new DocumentCloud Python library is released and community members release two new MuckRock tools.

The DocumentCloud navigation bar got a redesign, Premium Add-Ons are more prominently displayed, AI credit balances are easier to find, python-documentcloud drops Python 2 support, and Squarelet gives you a notice to contact your admins to approve your request to join an organization.