Title
Privacy and Access in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Records
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
Archival collections that include records about victims and survivors of child abuse present unique challenges regarding privacy, access, and representation. With a long tenure of collecting on the history of social welfare, University Archives and Special Collections (UASC) in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston had to address these challenges before processing and making available the historic inactive records of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC). UASC and the MSPCC took steps to ensure that the MSPCC collection would be accessible to the survivors represented in the records and to their descendants, while also providing appropriate access to the collection for the wider public. To protect the privacy of any former MSPCC clients who may still be living, the MSPCC and UASC collaborated to establish a set of policies that can be adapted by archives working with similar collections.
Recommended Citation
Jessica Holden and Ana Roeschley (2020) Privacy and Access in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Records. The American Archivist: Spring/Summer 2020, Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 77-90.
Publisher
Society of American Archivist
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Comments
This article was published in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of The American Archivist (Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 77-90): https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-83.1.77