Under Michigan law, Freedom of Information Act requests have specific mandatory time frames for replies. You must receive a response within five business days of the receipt of your request for records, and the agency can extend their response by 10 business days without justification by notifying you of their intent to do so.

What this means in practice is that you could send in a new FOIA request every workday for three weeks and not get your first request answered. If the request was rejected in whole or in part, there are additional delays associated with the appeal process.

If you are frequently sending in FOIA requests, you will want to track them on your side to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. I've been doing this routinely and systematically now for a couple of weeks, and think I finally have a workable, if not ideal, method for tracking my work and, most importantly, ensuring continuous follow up on slow moving responses.

Tracking everything for a single request

A typical set of research for a story, like my ongoing look at the regulation of water levels on the Huron River, has many possible points of contact. It's not unusual at all for multiple agencies to have jurisdiction over a particular issue and for multiple sets of partially overlapping records to be collected that might all have to be looked at to properly assess what is going on.

I'm keeping a column in a spreadsheet for tracking all related requests for a set of stories. At the top is a brief summary of the issue for my editor so that they know the task is worth pursuing; below that is enough points of contact at agencies and organizations to make sure that if I need to pick up the phone to talk to someone that it's readily at hand. Underneath that header is a day by day log of progress in tracking down information.

One very important thing to keep methodical detail on is the working hours of clerks who process FOIA requests. Many agencies assign a part-time person to this task, and if you don't get a question answered by Thursday, you may have to wait until the following Tuesday to follow up on it. Timing is everything.

Tracking everything for a single day's work

FOIA requests have deadlines for response, and it's important to track when you expect to receive a response when you send in a request for documents. I've seen some individuals add a paragraph to their requests stating the date by which they expect a response.

To track progress on all of the outstanding requests that are in my queue, I'll create a new row in the spreadsheet and work methodically across it, checking the status of each request, reviewing any new documents that have come in, and trying to assess if there's enough accumulated detail to enable me to sit down and write a daily column the next day to share what I've found.

If there were more hours in the day, I'd be doing this every day. At minimum, if you are managing a queue of FOIA work, you need to work the queue at least weekly, since enough can change in the span of a week to suggest a response.

Tracking story ideas where you know you can't work on it now

I have a Google News clipping file set up for the word "FOIA," and every day it dutifully sends me a long page of news stories and blog entries from around the county where some routine request for records — or, more frequently, a dispute around a records request — gets elevated to the level of news. Many of these stories suggest FOIA queries that could be applied to local units of government to pose interesting questions which may or may not result in interesting answers.

Given a finite amount of time, and more importantly a finite budget for pursuing records from agency heads reluctant to part with information, it's important to salt away some of those queries for later rather than take them all on now.

One of the questions I was pursuing last summer, and eventually got records for after lengthy search, was information about licensing of ice cream trucks in the area. That's a story in July, maybe, but in February it's not top in the mind of your readers.

Tracking publicly available information

The Freedom of Information Act is the worst possible search engine and the slowest and most cumbersome and maddening way to get answers to simple questions. It would be easier and faster to bounce a laser beam off the moon with your request encoded in it than to wait patiently for a response.

Fortunately, many agencies release a lot of public data. In many cases, the details which would be difficult, slow or expensive to request through a records search can be looked up in databases or sets of records which you can download and search through directly.

Publicly available records can also guide your searches, so that what you do ask from a records clerk is specified completely, accurately and in some detail. If you see me writing about publicly available databases, it's often so that if I need to do a deep dive for a detail again that I can recall the twisty complexity of the system which gave me what I was looking for.

Request tracking systems, for news gathering and FOIA response

Many agencies track incoming FOIA requests in some kind of database, so that they know what they have received and so that they can ensure timely compliance. Those FOIA logs are records, and you can request those for review.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued an RFQ for FOIA tracking software in 2007, specifying "commercial off the shelf" tools for managing requests. The Department of the Interior has an Electronic FOIA Tracking System to track requests and produce annual reporting. A solicitation for the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service FOIA tracker explains in some detail how the system can be expected to integrate with other parts of a labyrinthine Federal document tracking system.

On the FOIA requesting side, Muckrock News is a system for allowing citizens to track and share FOIA requests and to solicit crowd funding to pay for fees for request. Based in the Boston area, it primarily handles Federal and Massachusetts requests right now, and they have released more than 6,700 pages of public records in 50 successful requests.

Future work

A well-managed FOIA tracking system would systematically collect the full text of requests, responses and appeals. I'm not quite there yet.

A proper request tracking system would also assist in the process of preparing appeals for rejected requests. I don't have that done systematically now, though I have been noting and collecting paragraphs of appeal boilerplate which have worked in the past.

The more requests I make, the more come back with suggested costs that are too high for the value of the information that I expect to receive. Muckrock's crowd funding approach, where interested parties share in the cost of news gathering, is appealing.

Edward Vielmetti writes the FOIA Friday column for AnnArbor.com.