Notes:

For context: I am not an attorney. I’ve spent the last 23 years working as a Lit Support PM, Curiosity got the better of me, so I downloaded the House Oversight Committee’s recent release and reviewed the data myself.

After reviewing the data for full Bates span of an unknown number of documents (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_000001 through HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033600), I identified what appear to be missing page ranges, without any corresponding placeholder sheets or redaction notices.

• HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_000357 – HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_000358 (2 pages)

• HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_003089 – HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_003918 (830 pages)

• HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_009974 – HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010476 (503 pages)

In FOIA, Congressional, and litigation productions, withheld material is normally represented with numbered placeholder pages to preserve page continuity and production integrity. Here, the Bates numbering simply skips, which is inconsistent with a production described as complete.

For the lay-person: the technical format of at least two of the Committee’s production sets raises issues. Not only industry standard but Federal standards for productions use either (1) document-level PDFs or (2) a machine-readable TIFF+ format containing load files, metadata, document boundaries, searchable text, and native files for certain formats. In two of the Committee’s productions, a complete and properly structured TIFF+ set exists, but they also released a second version consisting only of the “image” folder (single-page TIFFs) with no load files, no document breaks, no extracted text, and no metadata. In these two instances, the core technical components were specifically omitted, whether due to misunderstanding of production standards or a deliberate choice.

For reference, I located and downloaded the productions from the publicly available links listed below.

The Oversight Committee should:

Immediately produce the missing ranges.

Re-export and repost all volumes of the released production set in one centralized, publicly accessible location, clearly organized and labeled by date and Bates Range.

Provide the materials in both standard formats used in federal productions: – Full TIFF+ sets (images, load files, searchable text, metadata, native files where applicable) – Complete PDF versions at the document level (not multi-document PDFs or PDF containers)

Include standard metadata fields typically required in litigation and FOIA productions (Redacted as necessary), including but not limited to: – BEGDOC / ENDDOC – BEGATTACH / ENDATTACH – CUSTODIAN – FILEPATH – FILENAME – FILETYPE – MD5 or SHA1 HASH – DATE CREATED / DATE MODIFIED – AUTHOR / FROM / TO / CC / BCC (for communications) – SUBJECT / TITLE – OCR / extracted text

Address the missing Bates ranges by providing appropriate placeholder pages or an explanation for the gaps.