Susan Cooper
Susan Cooper is spokesperson for the National Archives and Records Administration. Cooper has called for patience in the processing of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests of Clinton Library Archives documents. By February 2008 the Clinton archives had processed only 30 out of 300 requests for release of documents. Cooper explained that this was partly due to a lack of archivists - only six working with ten million pages at the time. Said Cooper, "If we have fewer trained personnel, we are unable to do as many preservation projects as we might like, and we're less able to serve the public in ways we would like to."
On the order for processing FOIA requests Cooper said, "It is first come first serve. However ... we set up different queues for FOIA requests. The queues can consist of, but are not limited to, the classified queue, the complex queue, the simple queue, the multiple-request queue, among others, the audio visual queue. So just because something is the 300th request that is received, it doesn't mean it's going to be processed as number 300. It might go into a queue, which is a shorter queue than some of the others so that an archivist might get to that request sooner than they would if we only had one queue."
References
- Peter Nicholas, "Hillary Clinton White House Records Still Locked Up," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2007.
