Monday, May 21, 2012

Reference On Florida Free Public Records

By Claire Dowell


The Freedom of Information Act, which was enacted in 1966, paved the way for the full or partial disclosure of records controlled by the government. Prior to this, Florida has started giving people access to public records due to the passing of the Florida Public Records Act in 1909 in Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes. The law contains policies, definition of terms, exemptions, general information on records access, inspection, and copying of records.

The act allows gives the responsibility to the government to disseminate public documents at the county level, state level, municipal level. The documents should be available for checking and for copying by any citizen as long as correct procedures are followed. The documents should be available online too provided that they are encoded exactly the same way as the text. Documents that are confidential in the original text should stay confidential when encoded online.

Despite being defined as open to the public, some records have limitations as to who can access them and when they can be accessed depending on which state you are searching and in accordance to the appropriate state laws. Documents such as continuing criminal investigation, papers regarding administration of public offices, propositions proposals, and many others are part of documents that have restrictions.

Public files are available at the appropriate government offices that are in-charge of them. There are different kinds of files that comprise public records. Photo Archives, Death Certificates, Social Security Statistics, Criminal files, Health Care Administration, Land Boundary Information System, Adoption papers, Vital Statistics which includes Birth, Death, Marriage, and Divorce files, and many more are considered as public files.

Through the years, the specification of public files has expanded and more files have been added to the list. Maps, books, tapes, photos, films, audio records, and computer files are now also considered as public records.

Getting the files from public agencies takes an ample amount of time to be processed and this will cause inconvenience if you need them for legal reasons. Good thing that you can seek the help of commercial record keepers. You can find them over the Web but you will have to decide whether to go for sites that are free-of-charge or those that require fees. Whichever you go for, you will get your free public records but there will be a difference in the quality of the versions of terms of depth and its fullness. Sites that require fees make use of a database linked to different sources both public and private to draw more data together. Public files are free, but it is the service of retrieving and processing the files that is being paid. Different files require different fees. Sometimes the files contain technical terms or 'jargons' that a person could not understand. Commercial record keepers organize them in a way that is easier to comprehend.




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