Wisconsin School for Girls Inmate Record Books: A Case Study of Redacted Digitization

Abstract

Abstract The Wisconsin School for Girls collection housed in the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) archives contains a variety of documents from the institution's period of operation. Inmates who were admitted to the institution were predominately juvenile females at the time of the records' creation; because of this, the contents of the records are protected by Wisconsin state statutes, which mandate restricted access for patrons as well as limitations on the use of the information contained within the records. This article examines how the restrictions on the collection continue to protect the privacy of the inmates and their descendants, what procedures WHS has in place to ensure continued trust in their custodianship, why a repository like WHS would value a collection with access restrictions, and who the primary patron group of this collection might be. Finally, this article argues that redacted digital representations of a limited number of the institution's records (with an option for patrons to a...