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GCN Home > June 25, 2001 issue

Interior calls on ASP to channel incoming flood of FOIA requests

BY RICHARD W. WALKER | GCN STAFF

The Interior Department’s Sue Ellen Sloca knows what it’s like to be swamped with documents. They’re piled everywhere in her office at the department’s headquarters.


Sue Ellen Sloca says handing off document management to an ASP makes sense because she and other Interior FOIA officers have enough of a challenge meeting FOIA deadlines.
“We’re behind big time,” said Sloca, the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act officer for Interior’s Office of the Secretary. “We usually get about 300 FOIA requests a year. We may end up with 400 by the end of this year.”

The secretary’s office has been flooded with FOIA requests from environmental and business groups and citizens seeking information about the Bush administration’s environment and energy actions.

“We recently had 10 requests for copies of Interior documents relating to [Vice President Cheney’s] energy task force—a very hot topic,” she said.

Since October, the secretary’s FOIA office has been piloting a Web management and tracking system that officials expect will make life easier for Interior FOIA officials nationwide.

And instead of trying to manage and scale the system themselves, Interior officials decided to offload it to an application service provider, Emergent OnLine Inc.

Get with the system

The system uses a Microsoft Access database and software developed by Document Systems Inc. of Washington, and runs on commercial off-site servers. Interior’s FOIA shops around the country access the system via the Web.

Emergent, an ASP with an 80,000-square-foot data warehouse in Reston, Va., hosts the system using application server software from Citrix Systems Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Emergent charges Interior $150 a month for each site using it, said Sloca, the project leader for the secretary’s office.

Interior officials expect the system to go live across the department by October 2003.

After that, the plan is to pitch it to other government FOIA offices through Interior’s National Business Center, which provides administrative and operational support services to federal agencies.

“Once this is successful we hope to sell it to other agencies,” Sloca said. “The first thing I’d like other agencies to do before they develop their own system is come in and see if they’d like to use our system.”

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