Public records

Public records are documents or pieces of information that are not considered confidential and generally pertain to the conduct of government.

Depending on jurisdiction, examples of public records includes information pertaining to births, deaths, marriages, and documented transaction with government agencies.

In the Inca empire of South America, which did not have writing, records were kept via an elaborate form of knots in cords, quipu, whose meaning has been lost.

Sunshine Week occurs in mid-March, coinciding with James Madison's birthday and National Freedom of Information Day on the 16th.

As court records become increasingly more accessible online, concerns about the undermining of private information has become a significant issue.

However, with the relative ease at which people can now access these records, highly sensitive information (i.e. victim names, social security numbers, etc.)

[13] A state that was fairly restrictive in how they respond to public records requests is Pennsylvania, where the law formerly presumed that all documents are exempt from disclosure, unless they can be proven otherwise.

[citation needed] With the advent of the Internet and the information age, access to public records in the United States to anyone who wishes to view them has dramatically increased.

Such requests tend to be unreasonably broad, repetitive, or based on misinformation, leading to what a Colorado official said amounts to "a denial-of-service attack on local government."

Local election officials in Florida and Michigan have reported spending 25-70% of staff time in recent years on processing public records requests.

In 2022, officials in Maricopa County, Arizona reported one request that required nearly half the election office’s staff to spend four days sorting and scanning 20,000 documents.

[22] According to the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, in the United States, arrest records "are generally open to the public unless they concern an active or ongoing investigation.