Earlier this afternoon, the Office of Open Records hosted a webinar about the 2019 Survey of Agency Open Records Officers (AOROs).

This is the third statewide survey of AOROs, the people directly responsible for responding to Right-to-Know Law requests.

Some highlights:

• We received 1,054 survey responses from a wide variety of agency types.
• Responses were received from agencies in all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties.
• More than 90% of agencies reported spending less than 5 hours per week responding to RTKL requests. (That includes 61.5% of agencies which spent less than 1 hour per week.)
• The median number of requests received was 13.5; the average was 43.2.
• 509 agencies reported receiving 12 or fewer requests.
• 101 agencies reported receiving 100 or more requests.
• The majority (51.2%) of requests were “general requests.” The next largest category was commercial requests (30.2%). News media requests were just 3.8% of the total.

Here’s the PowerPoint presentation I used for this session, which includes more data from the survey and related information:

AORO Survey Results Webinar – March 12, 2019 – PDF
AORO Survey Results Webinar – March 12, 2019 – PPTX

And here’s the underlying data, exported into Excel files in the three ways Survey Monkey allows (all three are ZIP files):

2019_AORO_All_Summary_Data
2019_AORO_All_Responses_Data
2019_AORO_All_Individual_Responses

The OOR regularly provides training on Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law and Sunshine Act. Our training calendar is available here, and we always welcome requests to provide training.

This is Sunshine Week 2019, and we’re hosting a series of webinars. I hope you can join us for some or all of them!