Embracing the Future as Stewards of the Past: Historical Medical Collections in the 21st Century

This is a guest post by Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine

It is a privilege to offer this blog post as a follow-up and complement to my October 21, 2016, Archives Talk at UCSF, and to do so as my NLM colleagues and I work with our leadership to craft the NLM’s third century and encourage public feedback on its strategic planning process.

For several years now, the NLM’s History of Medicine Division has been embracing the future as we continue our mission to collect, preserve, make freely available, and curate for diverse audiences the NLM’s treasured historical collections, which span ten centuries. I’ve described this mission as stewardship of the past, and I have argued that it is not mutually exclusive of embracing the future. This is because to be the best steward of history during times of change, it is important to anticipate, explore, and chart the paths toward many possible futures. So what do I mean by embracing the future?

Embracing the future means facing change. It means engaging and grappling with it, because studying history can contribute meaningfully to contextualizing and shaping change.

Embracing the future means supporting open and “citizen-centered” government. It means enabling access to all, not just a few. It means engaging new audiences, not only the traditional ones. It involves engagement across the disciplines, and across the spectrum of the public, to ensure that scholars, educators, and interested people of today and tomorrow can have access to the world’s historical medical heritage for research, teaching, and learning.

NLM’s treasured historical collections span ten centuries and originate from nearly every part of the world. Our digitization of these materials, for greater access by researchers of all disciplines, goes hand in hand with our preservation of them, in their original form, for future generations of researchers.

Embracing the future means embracing fair use and supporting robust digitization as a means of both access and preservation, and achieving these goals through mutually-supportive public and private partnerships. Moreover, embracing the future means appreciating and understanding that digitized historical medical collections exist in a format appealing not only to those focused on deep reading and close study of individual works, but also to scholars and to entirely new audiences who are interested in mining these digital surrogates and their associated metadata data for more data-focused research. The evolving digital world is producing an ever-increasing volume of digitized physical material and born-digital resources. The worlds of “big data” and data science are meeting a longstanding world of persistent physical objects that contain records of the human condition. As these worlds collide and coexist, opportunities abound to advance interdisciplinary collaboration and expand cooperation among institutions and organizations that preserve history and support current and future medical research, and research in all disciplines.

A Chorus of Voices. Through its blog Circulating Now, the NLM is giving voice our patrons from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, whoeach in their own way and together recognize the research and educational value of our world-renowned historical collections.

Embracing the future means pursuing exhibitions and otherwise giving voice to theresearch and educational value of our historical collections as they speak to important contemporary and historical topics like confronting domestic violence, understanding AIDS, politics, and culture, exploring 20th-century healthcare professionalization, and revealing how meals offer insights into the relationships between and among individuals.

And finally, from a leadership perspective, embracing the future means meeting individuals where they stand, treating them as colleagues and as part of a team. It means supporting mentorship to advance careers, and continuous learning to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching focused on historical and contemporary issues of health and the human condition. These initiatives are not only keys to embracing the future of challenges and opportunities. They are keys to succeeding in that future.

To learn more about my thoughts about embracing the future as stewards of the past, you can read this article or, if you wish, watch my October 21, 2016, Archives Talk at UCSF.

NHPRC awarded a grant to UCSF Archives and Special Collections

NHPRC logo

UCSF Archives and Special Collections (A&SC) is pleased to announce it has been awarded a 2016 National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) grant from the National Archives in support of the project, Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections, an expansion of the AIDS History Project (AHP).

The project will greatly expand the historical record of San Francisco’s broad-based response to the AIDS public health crisis, and make discoverable and accessible by a wide audience a new corpus of materials related to the evolution of that response. These collections reveal breakthroughs in containing the AIDS epidemic and treating AIDS patients that were made possible by the collaborative efforts of educators, researchers, clinicians, and community advocates. The collections included in this grant are interconnected and form a unique body of research materials.

Dr. Selma Dritz, ca. 1982. MSS 2001-04.

The $86,258 award will aid in creating and making accessible detailed finding aids for seven recently acquired collections comprising a total of 373 linear feet. These collections range from the research files of science writer Laurie Garrett and the papers of Drs. Don Francis and John Greenspan of UCSF and Selma Dritz of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, to the records of two UCSF entities, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the AIDS Health Project, and files from the early and pioneering publication AIDS Treatment News, produced by community activist John James. Diverse audiences will benefit from having access to the archival collections comprising this new project. They include scholars and students in disciplines such as history, literature, medicine, jurisprudence, journalism, and sociology,and members of the general public pursuing individual areas of interest, especially younger members of the GLBT community who seek a better understanding of this important period in history.

A small portion of the collections will be digitized and made accessible online. This 18-month project will commence on March 1, 2017.

A&SC would like to thank the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, the California Historical Records Advisory Board, and other supporters for their help with this proposal.

About UCSF Archives & Special Collections
The mission of the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is to identify, collect, organize, interpret, and maintain rare and unique material to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve institutional memory.

Please contact Polina Ilieva, Head of UCSF Archives & Special Collections with questions about this award.

Download a copy of the press release ArchivesJan2017_NHPRC_grant.

UCSF First Digital Archivist

UCSF Digital Archivist Charlie Macquarie

In the increasingly digital world when the majority of scholarly output comes in a digital format or is being digitized for ease of access, the UCSF Archives & Special Collection has been working the past 20 years on digitizing its holdings and building digital collections. However, now that the number of born-digital materials produced by UCSF faculty and researchers as well as outside donors is growing exponentially, there is a need to establish a Digital Archives Program within our department.

I’m happy to introduce our first recently hired Digital Archivist, Charlie Macquarie who will lead this program.

Charlie is an archivist, artist, and experimental librarian. Born in the Bay Area, he grew up in Carson City, NV and considers himself a Nevadan at heart. Charlie received his undergraduate degree in English from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, and his graduate degree in Information and Library Science from Pratt Institute in New York, NY. Employed most recently as a digital archivist at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Charlie has worked as a library and information professional at a variety of institutions, including Columbia University, the New York City Transit Authority, and the little old Carson High School library.

Charlie is also interested in using libraries and the opportunities of digital information creatively as a lens to examine possible expansions of the commons within the public consciousness, and to remind people of the power of shared ownership in an increasingly privatized world. As part of this, he has a creative practice that takes the form of the Library of Approximate Location — an ongoing itinerant project engaging with the confounding nature of environmental materiality and its disparate networks and landscapes in the Western United States through the installation of small scale, site-specific libraries. He is also a library research fellow and librarian in residence at the Prelinger Library.
He loves trains, bicycles, and heavy metal music.

Archives Talk: What Will It Take To End AIDS?

cover_toendaidsDate: Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm
Presenters: Pulitzer Center supported journalists Jon Cohen, Amy Maxmen, and Misha Friedman
Location: Parnassus campus, N-217, 513 Parnassus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94143

REGISTRATION REQUIRED: calendars.library.ucsf.edu/event/3017095

This event is organized and hosted jointly by UCSF Archives and Special Collections and the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for an afternoon talk with Pulitzer Center supported journalists Jon Cohen, Amy Maxmen and Misha Friedman as they discuss their reporting on HIV/AIDS around the globe featured in the ebook, To End AIDS (this book is available free on iTunes, Amazon, and Atavist). Once on the brink of ending AIDS, we have entered a period in which the virus is offering a stern warning to the human host: the consequences of complacency are great.

Jon Cohen tailors his decades of expertise to explain a nuanced issue in the movement to end AIDS: supply chain management of antiretroviral therapies, from pharmaceutical companies through patient adherence. Amy Maxmen reports from South Africa, where scientists are aiming to break a cycle of infections by providing HIV drugs for young women before they even contract the virus. Misha Friedman’s work epitomizes in-depth reporting: he has spent years documenting the crisis in Eastern Europe and recently returned to South Africa to interview and photograph HIV-infected subjects he first photographed three years ago.

Each journalist illuminates previously under-covered areas of HIV/AIDS reporting and aims to help us think critically.  Please join us in a panel discussion to explore just what it will take to end AIDS.

jon-cohenA reporter for Science since 1990, Jon Cohen has covered the HIV/AIDS epidemic for the magazine in more than three dozen countries. He also has written for the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Slate, and many other publications. His books include Shots in the Dark (W.W. Norton, 2001), Coming to Term (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), Almost Chimpanzee (Holt/Times Books, 2010), and Tomorrow Is a Long Time (Daylight Books, 2015). Cohen’s books and articles have won numerous awards and have been selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2008, 2011).

amy-maxmenAmy Maxmen is a science journalist who covers the entanglements of evolution, medicine, policy and of people behind research. Her stories appear in a variety of outlets, including Wired, National Geographic, Nature, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Her feature on the origin of humanity is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. In 2016, she won a Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers and the Bricker Award for Science Writing in Medicine. Prior to writing, she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

misha-friedmanMisha Friedman is a documentary photographer with a background in international relations and economics. His analytical approach to storytelling involves trying to look beyond the facts, searching for causes, and asking complex and difficult questions. Misha regularly collaborates with international media and non-profit organizations, including the New Yorker, Time Magazine, Spiegel, GQ, Le Monde, Bloomberg Businessweek, Sports Illustrated, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and others. His widely-exhibited work has received numerous industry awards.