In Brazil, presidents and other top government officials have the right to use “corporate cards” to cover occasional travel expenses and other small value purchases on behalf of the federal government. In January 2023, the journalism non-profit Fiquem Sabendo secured access to the invoices for these cards, and last week, the Brazilian newsroom detailed how they meticulously scanned and organized these documents, making them accessible for the first time.

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.

A side-by-side comparison of five OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents from DocumentCloud.

The DocumentCloud team is pleased to introduce a new way to upload responsive documents from your MuckRock requests directly to DocumentCloud, three powerful new OCR tools and several enhancements to our Python wrapper for the DocumentCloud API. These updates will help you upload documents more efficiently and provide better error tracking.