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Public Affairs Reporting: Home

government, journalism, research, public affairs, public records

Introduction

All states, cities, counties as well as the federal government, provide access to public records.  This guide lists sources for public records in Florida and at the federal level. Some sources for background information, such as newspapers,  are also included.  Also provides links to other guides that provide information on public records.

Florida Public Records

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Volusia County Clerk of Courts

Florida Offender Information Search

  • This database contains public record information on felony offenders sentenced to the Department of Corrections. This information only includes offenders sentenced to state prison or state supervision.

Volusia County Inmate Information Search

Florida State Agency homepages

Local Government (compiled by UCF Libraries)

MyFloridaCounty

  • Search thousands of official records across many counties (but not all counties), all in one place.
  • Click here for counties current range of dates - it varies by county. The list will also indicate which counties have records in the database. For example, Orange County and Miami-Dade county do not currently supply records to this site. (And there may be other counties as well that do not supply records).
  • Searching the index is free but ordering the records requires a purchase for each record. However, when you see a record of interest, you can then go to the county of record and freely access the full-text information there usually -unless there is a law that restricts showing this type of information to the general public.

Federal Public Records

Resources on Florida’s Open Government and Public Records laws.

Other Guides to Consult

Research Tip

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Throughout your professional career as a journalist, one of the best ways to find information sources on the Internet is to include the word libguides in your search terms.

Libguides are research guides created by librarians in many academic libraries. (Many public libraries and information providers also create libguides.) Libguides is the name of a software product and most (but not all)  libraries keep the word libguides in their guides URL -which is why adding that keyword to your search terms will help you find them.