The Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane Archives: Mental Illness, Race, and Privacy in the Digital Age This presentation describes a ten-year research and demonstration project at the University of Texas at Austin designed to develop a digital infrastructure for collecting, organizing, preserving, and analyzing 800,000 historical records from Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane (CLACI). A primary goal of the project was to increase access to historical mental health records while adhering to federal and state issues of privacy and confidentiality. The hospital staff maintained almost all of its original records and data on the development and operation of all aspects of the institution, demographic characteristics and treatment of patients who were admitted, and background of the professional staff. The project used mixed methods to catalog the records, contents, and create finding aids. We used content analysis to compare access and privacy policies and the readiness of state mental health and archive departments. And, we randomly surveyed 50 families and 50 historians to determine their interests in accessing historical records. These methods were followed by modifications of existing software (Archivematica, Fedora, Hydra Connect, Zooniverse) to create searchable data bases (files) for the digital library. Analysis of records of the first 30,000 persons admitted (1868-1941) showed a relationship between race, diagnosis, institutionalization and three culturally-based hypotheses, adopted by Virginia physicians and researchers. Parametric statistics were used to show correlations between admission and 34 characteristics of each person admitted to the hospital. Examples of the characteristics include severity of diagnosis, cause of illness, onset, commitment, gender, age, residence, marital status, occupation, education, and mortality.
