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Americans can learn about their state songs and state flowers with a quick search on the Internet, but most will have a harder time checking whether their children’s school buses are safe or a local gas station is charging too much.

A 50-state survey of government information online, conducted as part of the annual Sunshine Week campaign, found that although official records are increasingly available on the Internet, some important information is missing.

To conduct the survey, journalists and journalism students scanned government websites in every state to look for 20 kinds of public records. The results were released today at the start of Sunshine Week, a national initiative by journalism organizations to focus on open government and access to information.

“Digital technologies can be a great catalyst for democracy, but the state of access today is quite uneven,” said Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, one of the groups overseeing the survey.

“The future of freedom of information is online access, and states have a long way to go to fulfill the promise of electronic self-governance,” he said.

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The good, the bad

The information least likely to be found online were:

•Death certificates, available in five states.

• Gas pump overcharge records, eight states.

• School building inspections and safety ratings, nine states.

• School bus inspection reports, 13 states.

Information found most often online were:

•Statewide school test scores, available in all states.

• Department of Transportation projects, 48 states.

• Campaign finance data and disciplinary actions against physicians, 47 states.

Texas stars. The only state found to provide information online in all 20 categories was Texas. New Jersey was second with 18, North Carolina third with 17. The state with the sparsest information online was Mississippi.

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In Colorado

15 Types of public records that are available for free on the Internet, out of 20 categories

6th Colorado’s ranking nationally in the survey, tied with three other states

Details of the survey:

• School bus inspections are the responsibility of individual districts, so the Colorado Department of Education doesn’t have comprehensive records to put online.

• The $9 extra fee for death certificates is for expedited service through a private company called VitalChek Network Inc., said Ron Hyman, the state registrar of vital statistics.

• The other public documents in the survey that weren’t available online for free were comprehensive listings of fictitious business names, records of school building inspections and records of overcharging by gas pumps.