Earlier this year, the Office of Open Records conducted the fourth statewide survey of Agency Open Records Officers (AOROs), the people directly responsible for responding to Right-to-Know Law requests in Pennsylvania.

Some highlights from this year’s survey:

• We received 1,433 responses from a wide variety of agency types. (Last year, we received 1,054 responses.)
• Responses were received from agencies in all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties.
• Overall, the results were remarkably consistent with last year’s results.
• Nearly 92% of agencies reported spending less than 5 hours per week responding to RTKL requests. (That includes 62.2% of agencies which spent less than 1 hour per week.)
• The median number of requests received was 15; the average was 43.4.
• The majority (53.2%) of requests were “general requests.” That was followed by commercial requests (31.2%), discovery and litigation requests (6.1%), academic research requests (5.4%), news media requests (3.2%), and inmate requests (1.0%).

This PDF contains additional detail about the 2020 Agency Open Records Officer Survey:

2020 AORO Survey Results – April 9, 2020 – PDF

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

2020_AORO_All_Summary_Data
2020_AORO_All_Responses_Data
2020_AORO_All_Individual_Responses

Thank you to all of the AOROs who took the time to answer this year’s survey. Your participation is extremely valuable.