Bill > S1638

This bill aims to improve public access to electronic government records by requiring that when state agencies design or acquire electronic recordkeeping systems, they must ensure these systems can provide data in common formats like ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or UTF (Uniform Character Set Transformation Format), and that they can separate public information from information that is legally exempt from public view, allowing for the retrieval of just the public portions. Furthermore, agencies must make reasonable efforts to provide public records online for free, specifically listing certain types of records like final decisions, annual reports, and winning bids for public contracts, and must also create and maintain reference materials, such as a classification scheme of their records and an index of their databases, which should be posted on their websites. The bill also clarifies that when a public record is available electronically, requesters have the option to receive it in that format, and agencies must provide it in any requested format if it can be easily reproduced, with costs for electronic records limited to the actual expense of storage media, and any programming needed to retrieve or format records will not be considered the creation of a new record.