This Sunday kicks off "Sunshine Week," an annual national initiative running until March 17 that promotes the importance of open government and freedom of information.

At the University of Alaska, transparency is just as important. The Alaska Public Records Act makes many records open to inspection upon request.

As UAF's student newspaper, the Sun Star is perhaps more familiar with the benefits of this law than any other campus entity.

We see the good, the bad, and the ugly. In 2006, the Sun Star filed four records requests, which helped us inform you, the reader, what was going down at UA.

When hackers were revealed to have infiltrated the university's systems in April, the Sun Star used a records request to get a help desk file from the Office of Information Technology. It showed that employees knew about the hacking since at least October 2005, five months before when the university said it first learned about the server compomise.

This summer, we used a records request to obtain an inch-thick pile of e-mails and memos from the Athletics Department about the decision to rename UAF's sports teams the "Alaska Nanooks."

Another request, filed in December, formed the basis of our "Payday at UA" feature last month, which showed that 79 employees at UA earned more than the governor's $125,000 salary in 2006.

At times, records like these can be embarrassing to the institution. But it's important that they are made public to ensure trust between UA and its students.

Should we take all of this as an indication UAF is totally transparent? Not quite.

In 2003, the Sun Star had to sue UAF to get access to police records related to the arrest of a city councilman on DUI charges. We should never have had to sue, especially when the records concerned an elected official.

Then in 2004, the Sun Star filed eight requests over the course of two weeks to various departments at UAF.

It was a lot of requests. A university lawyer noted how much work it would take to review all of the records. If it took more than five hours to look over them, he said, UA would require the Sun Star to pay the staff hours it took to look those records over, as state law stipulates. We were asked to pay $192.

Since then, we've become more careful with our requests, fearing excessive fees. We now file, at most, one records request a month.

If the system were perfect, the information would flow freely and we could ask for it whenever we wanted without having to worry about money.

Records should be easy to access, not just for the Sun Star but for anyone, no matter how much information they're asking for and how often.

You too can request records from UA, or any Alaska government agency for that matter. If you'd like to learn how to write a records request, head to the Student Press Law Center's FOIA Generator at http://www.splc.org/foiletter.asp.