Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our new intern, Lupe Samano!
Lupe will be working on processing the Dick Fine Papers (MSS 2022-02). UCSF physician Dr. Richard H. Fine (1940 – 2015) worked at the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, where he served as chief of the adult health center for 25 years and helped found a primary care residency program to train doctors to work with poor and vulnerable patients. The collection contains yearbooks, appointment books, correspondence, clippings, audio/visual material, photographs, and ephemera.
Dick Fine Papers Intern Lupe Samano
Lupe has provided her introduction below:
Hello, my name is Lupe and I recently completed the MLIS program at San Jose State University. I moved to San Francisco in 2013 to attend San Francisco State University where I earned my BA in Philosophy and Religion. The past 6-ish years I worked with kids but didn’t find it in me to pursue teaching. During the COVID pandemic, my program organized a small library cohort, and the librarians there convinced me to pursue a degree in MLIS. I enrolled in the program shortly after and discovered that my true passion lies in archives.
I had the privilege of interning for NPS at the Presidio Park Archives and Record Center where I had a great time learning and exploring about not just archives but the history of San Francisco. I am thrilled for this opportunity to further expand my knowledge of the city’s history and gain more hands-on experience in archival work.
In my free time, I enjoy thrifting, hiking, watching my dog frolic on the beach, and starting coloring pages that I never seem to finish.
Upcoming UCSF Digital Health Humanities programming includes new text analysis workshops in collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and the UCSF Data Science Initiative (DSI). These workshops will orient you to the digital health humanities research potential of content from the vast HathiTrust Digital Library and UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections as well as common computational text analysis exploration approaches.
HathiTrust now includes more than 17.5 million digitized volumes from partner research library collections, including the University of California. Many of these volumes are useful for health humanities research, from documentation of institutional history, to government documents and published literature. Content from HathiTrust is made available for computational analysis primarily through HTRC tools and services.
HathiTrust Research Center Data and Tools for Digital Health Humanities: An Overview | May 19, 2023
On May 19, 2023 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, join HTRC’s Associate Director for Outreach & Education Janet Swatscheno, to learn about finding health-related resources in HathiTrust. The session will cover curating resources into collections, finding or establishing a textual corpus for your research, and tools for exploring and analyzing text as data.
Text Analysis for Digital Health Humanities: Using HTRC Data and Tools | May 26, 2023
On May 26, 2023 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. PT, DSI Instructor, Geoff Boushey is offering a companion workshop to the HathiTrust overview that will provide hands-on opportunities to learn and apply Python coding to conduct text analysis. The data will be derived from HathiTrust collection materials, including extracted features (metadata, derived text features, text as tokens) and full text from the publicly available UCSF University Publications collection, which documents histories of health sciences teaching, learning, and student activities from 1864 – 2009.
Jupyter Notebook Collection Data Exploration: No More Silence | June 2, 2023
Are you interested in familiarizing yourself with Python and using Jupyter Notebook to explore datasets? Join digital archivist, Charlie Macquarie, and DSI instructor Geoff Boushey on June 2, 2023 for a day-long novice-friendly workshop. They will guide you step-by-step through a data exploration notebook tailored to exploring a sample of the No More Silence dataset. You will get familiar with common data preparation and analysis tasks using Python. Research questions and attendant code will increasing in complexity throughout the session. This workshop is designed for learners who are new to computational textual analysis but have basic familiarity in Python programming concepts.
The No More Silence dataset represents materials from the AIDS History Project collections. The collections provide numerous opportunities to identify and contextualize how activists, journalists, researchers, and care providers responded to the epidemic and developed critical relationships.
Please contact Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine, at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu with questions about digital health humanities at UCSF. The UCSF DHH pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.
In 2023, the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is embarking on an ambitious oral history project that seeks to elevate the narratives, perspectives, and expertise of historically underrepresented populations in the education and research communities at UCSF. Through engagement with DEIA leaders from each of the four schools (Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy), we will record their experiences and document efforts to address and remediate inequities in health, health care, and health sciences education. Taking a profile approach, the goals for each interview will be informed by that person’s life history and experiences. At the conclusion of this one-year project we will organize a public event to introduce this new research corpus to the UCSF community.
Oral history is one of the many tools Archives & Special Collections uses to document different facets of UCSF’s history. One especially important project, the “Diversity in US Medical Schools” series, focused on policies pursued by UCSF and Stanford University medical schools to increase racial and ethnic diversity from the 1960s to the 2000s. This collection contains interviews with Julius R. Krevans, Philip R. Lee, John A. Watson, John S. Wellington, and others, and documents an important chapter in the university’s work to increase the diversity of medical students at the university. Oral history is a valuable tool because it allows us to document personal stories and remembrances often missed in paper records. As in efforts like the “Diversity in US Medical Schools” series, the DHEHS Oral History Project seeks to understand not just what, for example, DEIA initiatives UCSF has pursued, but why those who led these efforts chose a particular path and how their previous experiences influenced their thinking. Further, we can ask interviewees to reflect on these efforts from the present day and consider the long term impact of their work, including what was successful, and how they might have done things differently.
A selection of title pages from the “Diversity in US Medical Schools” oral history series, one of Archives and Special Collections’ many important oral history collections.
The first phase of the DHEHS Oral History Project includes forming advisory committees at each of the four schools. The advisory committees’ primary purpose is to develop and prioritize a list of interviewees from their respective schools. Projects of all types benefit from advisory committees, and oral history projects are no different. Especially for projects documenting institutional history, oral history practitioners can come in with little prior knowledge, and must learn as much and they can as quickly as possible. Advisory committees are an ideal group to provide institutional knowledge and expertise efficiently and strategically. For the DHEHS Oral History Project, with support from deans and administrators at all four schools, we’re fortunate to have all the advisory committees established, and all are in various stages of identifying potential interviewees and prioritizing who should be interviewed for this project. Interviewing should commence in the next quarter, and we look forward to hearing the personal experiences of those doing essential work around DEIA and health equity at UCSF.
To help researchers in finding and understanding how to work with data from archival health sciences collections, we have compiled and published the Archives as Data research guide. “Archives as Data” refers to archival collection materials in digital form that can be shared, accessed, analyzed, and referenced as data. Using digital tools, researchers can work with archives as data to explore and evaluate characteristics of collection materials and analyze trends and connections within and across them.
AIDS History Project Collections document included in the No More Silence dataset with Python code used for analysis.
UCSF Archives and Special Collections makes data available from a number of our digital collections. Researchers will find information in the guide about accessing and using such data as well as descriptions of both the form and content this data takes. As well, you’ll find a growing set of links to to learning resources about various data analysis methods used to work with archives as data.
This new Archives as Data research guide provides researchers with a centralized resource hub with brief descriptions of collection materials as well as links to the datasets that have been prepared from them, including:
The No More Silence dataset, an aggregation of data from selected collections included in the AIDS History Project which range from the records of community activism groups to the papers of health researchers and journalists.
Data from the Industry Documents Library, comprising collections of documents from the tobacco, food, drug, fossil fuel, chemical, and opioid industries, all of which impact public health.
Selected datasets from the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic and dedicated to collecting and publishing the data required to understand the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, with data collected from March 2020-March 2021.
Data from digitized UCSF University Publications, from course catalogs to annual reports, newsletters, and more.
We look forward to updating the guide as more data from UCSF Archives and Special Collections becomes available, and anticipate expanding to include links to “archives as data” of interest for digital health humanities work made available by other institutions and organizations.
To learn more about how we are making archives as data available at UCSF, check out recordings and resources from our recent sessions on Finding and Exploring Archives as Data for Digital Health Humanities!
The Archives as Data Research Guide has been published as part of the UCSF DIgital Health Humanities pilot program. Please reach out to the Digital Health Humanities Program Coordinator Kathryn Stine, at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu with any questions about DHH at UCSF. The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.
UCSF Archives & Special Collections includes numerous digitized collections documenting health sciences topics ranging from institutional, community, and individual response to illness and disease to industry impacts on public health. We make many of these collections available as data that can be computationally analyzed for health sciences and humanities research.
Voyant Cirrus term frequency visualization generated from AIDS health crisis workshops file data, 1986 from the UCSF AIDS Health Project Records, UCSF Archives & Special Collections (data available in the No More Silence dataset).
If you are curious about working with data from the UCSF Archives and Special Collections, the Digital Health Humanities (DHH) pilot program will showcase our “archives as data” throughout the month. In two upcoming sessions, we’ll provide an orientation to available data as well as methods for finding, accessing, and exploring these data resources:
DHH programming also continues to partner with the Data Science Institute (DSI) to offer workshops on tools and methods well-suited to conducting research with “archives as data.” March workshops in the DSI Python for Data Analysis series will dig in to text analysis using natural language processing and building machine learning models:
Through these workshops and selected companion follow-up sessions with troubleshooting and guided process walkthroughs, researchers can learn and practice data analysis techniques and get familiar with data from our collections. Check out the library’s events calendar to find and register for the latest offerings!
OpenRefine workshops
If you have data you’d like to work with but it needs tidying and preparation attend a DSI OpenRefine workshop. This workshop will cover techniques for cleaning structured data, no programming required! There will be two OpenRefine sessions this month:
OpenRefine for Archives as Data, Wednesday, March 8, 12 – 1:30 p.m. PT (This is a DHH companion session to the Cleaning Spreadsheet Data with OpenRefine DSI workshop and all are welcome.)
Previously-held DHH session slides, linked resources, and recordings are available on the CLE. There you will find materials from a Digital Health Humanities Overview session and recorded walkthroughs for Unix, Python, and Jupyter notebooks basics. Related resources will be updated on the CLE following DHH sessions.
Questions?
Please contact DHH Program Coordinator, Kathryn Stine, at kathryn.stine@ucsf.edu. The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.
Guest post by Heather Wagner, Digitization Coordinator at UC Merced Library
For the Pioneering Child Studies project the UC Merced Library’s Digital Curation and Scholarship unit was tasked with digitizing 68,000 pages of documents. So, how do we go about digitizing 68,000 pages of documents? With some help. That help comes from four undergraduate student assistants who play an important part in the digitization process.
The first part of the process is the actual digitization. Our undergraduate student assistants digitize materials on a variety of equipment. These include high speed document scanners and flatbed scanners for documents, book scanners for bound material, and cameras on stands for oversize or fragile materials.
Student Nicolas Fleming digitizing bound materials using a book scanner
Once the digitization is complete, the next step is quality checking. Students review each image in Adobe Bridge and zoom in to check for issues such as lines in scans or items out of focus. Some images may need minor editing such as straightening and cropping which is completed during the quality checking step in Photoshop. The quality checking step is time consuming but necessary, so we are sure we are receiving the best possible results from digitization.
PDFs with optical character recognition (OCR) are created from the digitized image files so they are accessible to users. OCR makes the PDF document searchable. The PDF documents are then quality checked by the students, and the documents are then optimized. Optimizing the PDF files reduces their file size, which makes them better suited for web viewing. The files are then ready for uploading.
We appreciate the hard work of our undergraduate student assistants. We would not be able to complete digitization projects of this size without them.
Once again we contributed to the New York Academy of Medicine’s #ColorOurCollections. We’ve created a coloring book featuring images from our rare books collection. Please download the book, color, and tweet your creations @ucsf_archives using #ColorOurCollections.
Carlton Benjamin Goodlett, PhD, MD (1914-1997) was a San Francisco newspaper publisher, civil rights leader and physician. He practiced medicine at Mount Zion Hospital (now known as UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion) and at that time, was one of only three Black doctors in the city.
His 1997 obituary in Synapse, UCSF’s student newspaper, enumerated his many accomplishments and commitment to social justice. Goodlett graduated magna cum laude from Howard University in 1935. At the age of 23 he received his doctorate in child psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, making him one of the first Black students to receive a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. He went on to receive his medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.
Goodlett’s legacy includes leading boycotts of businesses that discriminated against people of color and participating in student protests at San Francisco State University. He was also a co-founder of the San Francisco Young Democrats. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Until the emergence of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, Goodlett was the dominant figure in San Francisco’s civil rights movement in securing jobs for African Americans and appointments to important city commissions that blacks had never held.”
Another notable element of the Synapse article is a featured a drawing of Dr. Goodlett by the American graphic artist Emory Douglas (b. 1943). Douglas was the minister of culture and revolutionary artist for the Black Panther Party. He designed the Party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, and was responsible for the publication’s iconic imagery.
For additional resources on Carlton B. Goodlett and Emory Douglas:
UCSF Archives and Special Collections is delighted to announce the publication of the Leona Mayer Bayer Correspondence digital collection on Calisphere. The digitization project is part of the NHPRC grant, Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics. We worked in partnership with UC Merced Library’s Digital Assets Unit towards our goal of digitizing and publishing 68,000 pages from the collections of Drs. Hulda Evelyn Thelander, Helen Fahl Gofman, Selma Fraiberg, Leona Mayer Bayer, and Ms. Carol Hardgrove. To date we have digitized over 59,000 pages. Most digitized material is still undergoing quality assurance (QA) procedures. Here are some items we have digitized from Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer collection.
Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer received her MD from Stanford University Medical School in 1928. She worked with the Institute of Human Development in Berkeley and focused on child development, human growth, and psychology of sick children. The collection consists of around 400 digitized pages and the collection features professional correspondence of Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer. Some items that may be of interest is her correspondence with Dr. Hilde Bruch and her acceptance remarks for the PSR Broadstreet Pump Award she received in March of 1987.
We are excited to introduce Allison Tracy-Taylor who joins UCSF Archives & Special Collections as an Oral History Archivist. Allison will be leading the Oral History Program (OHP) supported by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund and Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication that will enable the university to record and preserve diverse voices of the UCSF faculty sharing their stories in their own words and better shape the legacy they leave behind.
This program aims to better understand and share the history of the health sciences education through recording, transcribing, and preserving oral histories with members of the UCSF teaching and research community and by making these oral histories available to the public. Through engagement with DEI leaders, the project will record their experiences and document efforts to address and remediate inequities in health, health care, and education. The Oral History Program will elevate the narratives, perspectives, and expertise of historically underrepresented populations in the education and research communities at UCSF. This one-of-a-kind public record will address “silences” and gaps in the existing historical narrative. Allison will collaborate with faculty to convene Oral History Advisory Committees at each of the schools to identify and develop the list of interviewees and perform outreach activities related to the program.
Allison Tracy-Taylor
Collecting and preserving archival material that documents nuanced historical narratives and encourages contemporary conversations has been a major theme of Allison’s work. Most recently as an independent oral historian based in Sacramento, CA, Allison was the project lead for the California State Library website Voices of the Golden State, a curated collection of oral histories exploring many facets of California’s history. She also worked on multiple oral history projects, including a project on the history of the medical device technology industry in Silicon Valley for Stanford BioDesign, and the Documenting the Experiences of Mexican, Filipina, and Chicana Women in California Agriculture Oral History Project for the Center for Oral and Public History at Cal State Fullerton.
Allison is passionate about supporting oral history practitioners and growing the field into an inclusive, equitable space. She served as the 2019-2020 President of the Oral History Association (OHA), as well as on the OHA’s Council for several years. While president she initiated the development of the OHA’s Guidelines for Social Justice Oral History Work, convened and served on the Independent Practitioners’ Task Force, which developed a robust toolkit for independent oral historians, and chaired a task force that developed remote interviewing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Community engagement and education have also been central to Allison’s work. Prior to going independent, Allison worked as the Oral History Administrator at the Kentucky Historical Society, overseeing the Kentucky Oral History Commission (KOHC), the only commission of its kind in the United States. She provided outreach, education, and technical support to oral history practitioners and programs throughout Kentucky. Allison was also the Oral Historian for the Stanford Historical Society, documenting Stanford University’s history through the stories of faculty and staff and serving as the program’s senior oral history mentor.
Allison began her work in oral history at the University of Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP), serving in multiple roles, including as an interviewer for a multi-year project on the history of women’s athletics at the University of Nevada, and an editor for the resulting book We Were All Athletes: Title IX and Women’s Athletics at the University of Nevada. In addition to an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University, Allison holds a B.A. in Sociology and English Literature from the University of Nevada.
In her free time, Allison enjoys hiking, reading, the distinct hobbies of collecting craft supplies and crafting, and baking. Though she will always be a Nevadan at heart, she has come to love the profound beauty of California.
