Compliance with the public records law is mandatory for all public bodies and their employees. If your office receives a public records request, please direct the requester to the UO Office of Public Records at pubrec@uoregon.edu so that an actual request can be made to the office charged with receiving such requests. 

Requests must be acknowledged within five business days of receipt, and records must be provided within 10 business days after acknowledgement. These timeliness for Acknowledgement or Response may be suspended in instances where staff is unavailable to complete a request, compliance with the timelines would demonstrably impede the University’s ability to perform other necessary services, or the University is simultaneously processing a high volume of other requests. If you believe one of these instances applies to you, please advise the office as soon as possible, so that we may discuss a response timeline.

Our office will work with your office to develop an estimate of the time and cost to search for, gather, and provide the requested materials, to the extent they exist and can be provided.
The office requests that you provide an estimate in hours, or portions thereof, that you believe it will take you to fulfill the request, rather than the time frame in which the work will be done. For instance, if you will have to spread the time over two work days, but it will only take one hour each day, you would give the office an estimate of two hours. 

The Office of Public Records will confirm with you when and if your office should begin gathering materials, how to track time and expenses, how to get materials to our office, etc. Once the office has advised you that the request is moving forward, records should be provided to the office in their native format as attachments to the request for records. If records are too large to send via email, please contact the office so that we may arrange to receive the records via OneDrive or another medium. 

For advice on how to search emails, provide screen shots, or estimate your time, please contact the office. 

The Office of Public Records is responsible for determining whether records or their contents are exempt or subject to redaction, though the office is happy to discuss the records with you at any time.

Every office on campus should be aware that Oregon law provides specific retention periods for various kinds of records. The UO Records Management Policy can be found in the Policy Library, and the Records Retention Schedule is available here.

Please note that a subpoena is not a public records request. If you are served with a subpoena, make a note of how and when you received it, retain all documents, and contact the Office of the General Counsel immediately at (541) 346-3082 or gcounsel@uoregon.edu. The law provides strict timelines for responding to a subpoena.

See our FAQ page for more information on public records reques