Problems of Confidentiality in the Administration of Personal Case Records

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

“…Virginia Stewart argued that, in the case of redacted records, the archivist does "a disservice to those attempting to correlate information from several agencies or systems, to those attempting longitudinal studies of individuals, and to those personal users seeking to learn such matters as age, marital status, or health treatment." 56 In the case of the Wisconsin School for Girls' records, the removal of all identifying information would indeed make it almost impossible for patrons to access digitized records about a specific inmate unless they already knew the inmate's record number. However, as in the case of the eugenics website, any patron using the Wisconsin School for Girls' collection would always be able to access the original documents with identifying information at…”

Social Control in China: A Study of Chinese Work Units. By Victor Shaw. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. xiv, 288 pp. $59.95.

“…In the West, personal and organizational information is collected and maintained by both governmental and private agencies in written, auditory, visual, electronic, and other forms. The conflict between the public's right to know and the individual's personal privacy is first recognized in archives access administration (Steward 1974). Legislated, contracted, and limited approaches are thereafter ~ndertaken to compromise one with the other (Baumann 1986 In reality, however, records can be collected, managed, and used with biases and errors, which often causes undue disposal of control or beneficial treatments.…”