Providing Restricted Access to Mental Health Archives within Government Archives: The Subject Stakeholder

Since 2010, the author has been part of the Central State Hospital (CSH) Digital Library and Archives Project to digitize records from the first state psychiatric hospital for African Americans, founded in 1870 in Virginia at the pleadings of the Freedman's Bureau and run by the state since then.1 Many of the records of this hospital not yet accessioned by the Library of Virginia have now been digitized, and this project is working on a set of tools for lawful access, including one that can be used for automated redaction to protect sensitive data while responding to the needs of different stakeholder groups. Project participants were especially concerned about understanding the communities that have grown up around state-run psychiatric hospitals, as the project was done at the request of the hospital. The proposed plan is to work with the Central State Hospital and the Library of Virginia to provide the project materials to both. The records that were chosen to be digitized included the minutes of the people who first ran the hospital as well as the registers kept on the patients, which differ over time.2 In the past ten to fifteen years, professional discussion about community archives has responded to communities' desires to build their own archives so that they can be treated fairly, especially with reference to records created about them and kept by others, including records found in state archives.