Anupama’s on the phone with yet another FOIA officer clarifying the nature of our request for correspondence logs listing letters from and responses to members of Congress, in an electronic format. It’s amazing how many responses we’ve gotten that miss the mark of the request. Agencies send us actual letters rather than logs, or handwritten logs of correspondence, or (in one case) what looks like printouts of some form of spreadsheet scanned into PDF documents (absolutely useless for our attempts to turn what we get from the agencies into a searchable database of correspondence). I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon looking at one of them–a three-inch thick stack of papers we got from the Department of Labor’s Office of Administrative Law Judges. Among other things, I’m going to do the log myself in an excel format as an experiment to see how long it takes (I type pretty slowly).