OHSU’s Historical Collections & Archives holds extensive 19th and 20th century archival collections that document public health in Oregon. These collections provide vital early research data, yet these analog materials remain largely inaccessible to the data-driven health sciences researchers of today due to format and access systems. Inaccessible legacy data hinders scientific discovery, and generates redundancies and inefficiencies in the research enterprise. “Public Health in Oregon: Accessing Historical Data for Scientific Discovery” has sought to rectify some of these problems through digitizing records, redacting protected health information (PHI), and transcribing data into a more usable and accessible format. This poster focuses on issues encountered and solutions devised around selecting data for digitization and transcription, redacting data according to HIPAA Safe Harbor methodology, reformatting and cleaning up legacy data during the transcription process, standardizing data entry procedures, and creating access to the reformatted data and redacted image files. The lessons learned from this project will benefit anyone working with similarly difficult historic data, especially from the health and sciences fields.