The title of Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law, approved in 1957, turned out to be a misnomer. Government documents are presumed to be off-limits to the public; the burden is on an ordinary citizen to prove why such records should be open.

The new legislation places the burden on government officials to explain why some records should be kept secret. That feature of the new bill trumps the legislation's shortcomings.

The bill would create a new Open Records Office, but - in one of the bill's most serious drawbacks - the legislature would not come under that office's jurisdiction. The House and Senate would instead decide for themselves whether they are in compliance.

Both chambers would appoint an "appeals officer" to rule on requests for government documents; those officers would sometimes be under enormous political pressure to side with the legislature.

We wish legislators had the courage to put this decision-making role in the hands of someone outside their direct influence. But the larger point is that this legislation would, for the first time, put the legislature under the scope of the open-records law.

Another shortcoming is that legislators decided to put the new Open Records Office in the Department of Community and Economic Development, part of the governor's administration.

It should be under the domain of the state Ethics Commission, where it would more likely be free of political interference.

Lawmakers did lessen the potential impact of politics by creating a six-year term for the director of the office, overlapping a governor's four-year term.

The creation of an Open Records Office would mean that, in most cases, citizens won't need to go to court to challenge a government agency's denial of their request for records. That's a big improvement over current law, too.

Legislators also removed a bad provision that would have deleted birth dates from court documents and other records. They made sure the bill would apply to past government records and extended its reach to financial records of the judiciary.

Some proponents of a stronger bill want to go back to the drawing board. But doing that might allow special interests to add more loopholes. The bill before the legislature now is a big step forward for Pennsylvania.