Our friends at CREW are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies–GovernmentDocs.org: An online compendium of scanned images of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by (right now) a handful of nonprofit groups (including the correspondence logs that Anu’s been acquiring for our RealTime project). Documents that once would have been filed away can have second and third lives online, where they can be read, annotated, tagged, and otherwise scrutinized by anyone who signs up to create an account.

CREW also uses OCR technology to make the images word-searchable; the results aren’t always perfect but they do make the documents easier to navigate.

CREW’s release is online here, and, full disclosure: Sunlight Foundation supported the creation of the site.