It baffles me that in order to request a file from some database you need to write a letter to a person who then responds back after a month. Did you end up incurring fees of $48/h for searching and per-page fees as well? I thought that a major benefit of the internet is that we don’t have to do this anymore.
The Internet reduces the cost of access distribution, but not the work of locating information and meeting bureaucratic regulations for its publication. Even for institutions in which data preservation and access is fundamental to the bottom line, this is a hard problem. Think of the many game companies who have had to remake classics without access to the original source code and/or assets, such Icewind Dale II [0] and FF7 [1].
The good news is that repeated public records requests can eventually push an agency to come up with a streamlined process that prioritizes making records available by default. Or at least, a bulk dump, in the case of the FBI and celebrity death files [2]
