Author Archives: Charles Macquarie

UCSF Awarded California Revealed grant

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We’re happy to announce that we have been selected to digitize several of our collections through the latest round of the California Revealed digitization granting program. California Revealed is a California State Library-funded initiative to digitize, preserve, and serve historically significant Californiana in partnership with archives and other repositories across the state.

For this latest round of digitization, which will begin in April of this year, we will be digitizing our Tales and Traditions scrapbooks, several of our scrapbooks documenting the experiences of Hospital Unit 30 in World War II, and several folders from the records of the Black Caucus, specifically production materials for their Black Bulletin newsletter.

All of these collections combined document some fascinating slices of California history where it intersects with the history of UCSF. Since UCSF is one of the older UCs (though it has changed form several times), it should come as no surprise that they intersect a lot! Just as a sample, these materials contain histories of the development of a public health program in the state of California, an account of California survivors of WWII war crimes such as Nazi medical experiments and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima, the development of one of the first summer camps created specifically for people with diabetes, the medical questions that were at the beginning of the California drug craze, and the development of the civil rights movement in California and the intimate ties between organizers who were employed at UCSF and the larger nationwide movement.

We’re excited to get these materials digitized and available to everyone, no matter their location. We’ll announce when they’re online.

Web-Archiving at UCSF: now with Request to Capture

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As you may remember, we’ve been going through the process of revamping our web-archives collections and services, and have been posting some updates as we go along. As we’ve written about on here before, in the Archives we periodically crawl and save copies of UCSF websites to document the institutional history and changing and developing public face of the University.

If you spend much time attempting to save and document websites, you quickly learn that things on the web change A LOT, and they change quickly — a lot more quickly than you might think, in fact. The average life of a website is only 100 days. Here in the Archives, we feel this most clearly as the speed with which our “URL Seed List” (the list of sites we’re archiving) becomes out of date, and does not include important new campus websites.

We’re in the middle of an ongoing project to try to better address these gaps in our collecting by manually updating our lists to reflect more centralized UCSF IT record-keeping, and by coordinating our efforts with the UCSF IT and Web-Governance groups to make sure we get at least one good copy of sites that are at “end of life.” But there’s more to this too, if you’re a member of the UCSF community then we want to hear from YOU about what sites we should be collecting.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a new section to our website where UCSF affiliates can submit a request to have their site captured and added to the archive, and/or have the url added to our seed list for ongoing capture. Just as with the physical archives, our collection is curated, so we cannot guarantee selection of your site for capture, but regardless we want to encourage you to submit far and wide!

We know there are many important UCSF-affiliated websites that we’re not currently capturing, and so we’d love to expand our collections to better reflect the rich institutional life of this dynamic and diverse community of researchers and clinical practitioners. So if you’re in charge of a website that we should be capturing, submit a request to us today!

Submit requests here: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/ucsf/web/

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Born-Digital Archival Description

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We know that, if you’re not an archivist, the intricacies of archival descriptive standards and finding aid creation might quickly make your eyes glaze over. However these descriptive standards are pretty important to our work, and to the usability of the materials we collect, so we want to take a moment to share an archival description project that some archives staff have been working on. It may seem mundane, but we think it’s a pretty big deal.

If you’re a regular archives user you probably know that most of the information about our collections is recorded in a finding aid — a document which provides contextual information about the collection and gives a list of all the things inside. We describe collections this way — in aggregate rather than individually like books or journal articles — because it’s important to maintain the context of an archival collection. A chain of letters or emails, for example, are best understood when they are viewed alongside all the other pieces of the chain. Not only would it be impossibly labor intensive to individually catalog each letter or each email, but it would also end up being an impediment to actually accessing and understanding each individual piece. The meaning of each item in a collection relies completely on its context.

When we are describing collections and making finding aids here in the archives, we often refer back to standardized guidelines which the archival field has produced to define the rules about how to describe something. In our case, this is usually a document called “Describing Archives: A Content Standard”, also known as DACS. DACS does contain some guidance about describing digital archival materials, but for many born-digital materials (laptops, smart phones, magnetic disks, and the files they contain), DACS lacks the information and specificity we need as processing archivists.

To help try to address this problem, Charlie Macquarie (our digital archivist) has been working for the past year with the other digital archivists in the UC System — Annalise Berdini at UC San Diego, Shira Peltzman at UCLA, and Kate Tasker at UC Berkeley — to come up with a set of detailed instructions for describing these materials. This team started by examining existing practices used in finding-aid creation at 35 different archival institutions, and from these examples and from professional experience drafted a detailed set of rules. They solicited and received feedback from archivists and librarians across the UC System in 3 different rounds of review, and received approval to publish and establish these guidelines as a UC-wide standard for describing born-digital archival material.

Now that these guidelines are published, anyone can view them and provide feedback. The most up-to date version of the guidelines is available on GitHub as a repository, and a static version of the guidelines (if you don’t want to navigate a GitHub page) can be viewed as a pdf file inside that repository. As computing, processing, and describing practices evolve these rules will necessarily have to change accordingly, so the document should be considered a living one. If you’re interested in the ins and outs of archival description, please feel free to provide feedback (or submit a pull request) if it strikes you!

Now that this UC-wide guideline exists to help inform our own institutional practice here at UCSF, we hope to be able to start adding information about born-digital collections to our finding aids more frequently. Keep an eye out for new description of digital archival materials coming down the pike!

Finally a special thanks is in order to David Uhlich, Kelsi Evans, David Krah, and Polina Ilieva who all reviewed and provided important feedback to the guidelines in the initial review phases.

 

Archives Staff Volunteer Day

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Last week all of us in Archives got together to do a volunteer day with the Sutro Stewards working in their nursery and doing maintenance on the Sutro Forest. You might think of the Archives as a bookish place, but we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty with other kinds of stewardship besides the historical. As spits of rain began to fall we climbed the hill to the summit of Mt. Sutro to spend a day digging in the dirt and working in the weeds and the fog.

The Sutro Stewards work to conserve habitat through ecological restoration and native plant propagation while providing recreational opportunities in the UCSF Mt. Sutro Open Space Reserve. We were led in our work by Amy Kaeser, executive director of the stewards, who explained the group’s activities collecting and propagating native Bay area plants in their nursery and restoring native habitat while building and maintaining trails and recreational facilities on the mountain.

Amy Kaeser speaking to archives staff.

Amy Kaeser talks to archives staff about the Sutro Stewards Nursery operations.

Our volunteer tasks for the day consisted of re-potting plants in the nursery and weeding areas in the field where native plants had recently been re-introduced. Half of us started by re-potting native Yerba Buena, Sticky Monkey, and Columbine plants that needed bigger pots to continue their life. We finished almost 200 of these by the end of the day.

The other half of us ventured out into the field to pull weeds (himalayan blackberry, cape ivy, and nasturtium) from newly-planted plots where natives were being in the process of being re-introduced. We successfully pulled innumerable weeds, and also discovered several buckets worth of weird trash, all while learning about the ecology of the Sutro forest and mountaintop. Did you know that you can eat the seed pods of nasturtium? They taste a bit like horseradish.

Archives staff pulling weeds from hillside while our crew leader talks to someone in the foreground.

Archives staff pulling weeds from newly planted areas.

We had a great day digging in the dirt, being outside, and helping re-introduce some of the natural biodiversity back to Mt. Sutro. As much as we love the vaults, it’s always good to get some sunshine (or, in this case, fog and rain).

Archives staff posing in the nursery for a group photo

Archives Month — October 2017

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Librarian Dorothy Allen explains how to use reference materials in the library. October is Archives Month! (also AIDS Awareness Month coincidentally). Since we’re an archive, we’re celebrating! Archives Month, if you haven’t heard of it, is “an opportunity to tell (or remind) people that items that are important to them are being preserved, cataloged, cared for, and made accessible by archivists.” We’ll be taking this opportunity to host all kinds of events and happenings which will revolve around the historical materials we preserve.

What exactly will we be doing? A lot! Here’s a brief summary:

  • On October 4th: Opening reception at 12 pm for our exhibit of Dr. Arthur Ammann’s photo-montages — a call for an end to the violence against women represented by the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.
  • Also on October 4th: We’ll be participating in #AskAnArchivist Day on October 4th all day long. We’ll be diligently tending our Twitter account (@ucsf_archives), so send us questions about our collections, our jobs, or anything else to do with stewardship of historical materials! Tag your questions with #AskAnArchivist to join the conversation.
  • On October 6: Archives Lecture at 12 pm by Dr. David Smith on the history of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics, which he founded 50 years ago just down the street.
  • On October 17: ZSFG Archives Drop-in exhibit at 12 pm. Learn about the history of ZSFG, meet Griffin the ZSFG Archivist, and see materials from the collections.
  • On October 28: Visit us and other SF institutions for San Francisco Archives Crawl: Counterculture and Social Protest, 12-5pm.
  • On October 30: A Spoooooky Halloween open house at 12 pm in our reading room where we’ll exhibit various macabre images and frightening implements from the early days of medicine.

A Dental Student work on the teeth of a patient.

And of course, the main thing we will do this month is the same thing we do every month: steward the materials that document our collective past and inform our future. We hope you’ll join us in October to celebrate archives, and thank you for your support!

A (very) brief Report back from Society of American Archivists

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It’s been a whirlwind last couple of weeks for me as I bounced from conference to conference, but as I settle back in it’s been exciting to collect my thoughts on what I’ve learned. And while it’s still fresh in my memory, this is a brief report back from the largest conference I attended — the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) which was held last week in impossibly-quaint Portland, OR.

Being the digital archivist, I mostly spent my time in sessions focused on processing, preserving, and providing access to digital materials, in all the different forms that can take. One of the most fruitful of these was hosted by colleagues from UCLA, UCB, Stanford’s Hoover Institute, Cornell, and Emory, and was entitled “What we talk about when we talk about processing born-digital.” This session reported on an effort to establish shared definitions for what it means to process born-digital archival collections. Because this field is so new, what is considered “processing” a collection at one institution might be a totally different set of tasks from that performed at another. To address this, the group is attempting to identify which steps are essential or recommended, and assign different processing levels based on these frameworks.

To attempt to break all these steps out in a clear way is an immense amount of work, so I’m incredibly excited that my colleagues have begun to take on this huge task. It will help us all out in a massive way.

UCSF was not without good representation, as our own Polina Ilieva moderated several events — one that was a meeting of the section on Science, Technology, and Health Care archives, and one that was a panel discussion on Collecting and Preserving contemporary science in institutional archives.

Two people in front of a power-point presentation at a meeting of the Science, Technology, and Health Care Section of the Society of American Archivists.

A very poor photo of Polina Ilieva taking over as Senior Co-Chair of the Science, Technology, and Health Care Section of the Society of American Archivists

Finally, some of my most interesting food for thought came from a panel on archival responses to climate change. The panel covered everything from Native Hawaiian community preservation of historic material endangered by sea level-rise, to projects acquiring better data to map which archival repositories are likely to be most affected by a changing climate. Especially pertinent for my work was a presentation urging us as digital archivists to think more explicitly about what kinds of energy use we are engaging through our different preservation practices. Simply put: current digital preservation practices rely on cheap data storage, and cheap data storage relies upon energy from fossil fuels. So where can we start to change that?

More updates soon as we start to engage with all these thoughts more directly at UCSF.

Health Sciences Data Laboratory and digitized medical records

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Today’s post is a brief update on the implementation of the Health Sciences Data Laboratory, a collaboration between the UCSF Archives & Special Collections and the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine (DAHSM). Last year DAHSM and the Archives were awarded a Resource Allocation Program (RAP) grant to purchase a high-throughput document scanner and begin the huge task of digitizing some of the more than 7 million historic patient files that track the development of care at Mt. Zion and UCSF Hospitals in the 20th century. These files contain a wealth of data – demographic, clinical, and public health – which has been mostly inaccessible on paper media for the life of the record. Electronic health records – data which was collected for clinical rather than research purposes – have already proven unexpectedly useful for epidemiological and public health research (Diez Roux, 2015). Similarly, this lab aims to make the valuable data contained in these records available for new computational access, and to bring a large body of historical records into the realm of big-data health science research.

But for right now, we’re figuring out how it all works! The scanner we were able to purchase is a powerful machine, and at max speed can scan almost 280 pages per minute. Because most of our documents are relatively-fragile paper from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, we scan at a slower speed than this. This helps us to minimize potential for damage of the records and optimize image quality and file size. Even at a slow speed however, this process is vastly improved by the new scanner, which can scan an entire stack of paper (700 pages when full) in one go. Formerly each page had to be scanned one by one, on a flatbed scanner which created only one image at a time.

The new sheet-fed scanner in the Health Sciences Data Laboratory.

The new sheet-fed scanner in the Health Sciences Data Laboratory.

Now that we’ve got the scanner working smoothly and a workflow in place, we’re hoping to begin ramping up production soon. Currently, our intern Maopeli is working on digitizing patient records in order to draw some small-scale research conclusions on the income-levels of patients at that time and how these related to specific health conditions that they experienced, research being done as part of an internship with the CHORI program.

We hope not only to increase the rate of scanning (7 million records is a lot to get through!) but also to start exploring new ways to facilitate researcher access to this wealth of data. As evidenced by the image of a blank sample record, the data contained in these materials is both detailed and comprehensive, but it also requires a lot of labor, both human and computer, to make it computationally actionable. Much of it is handwritten and must either be transcribed or put through heavy-duty image processing algorithms which are more than most researchers have access to. For now though, we’re happy to be finally taking the first important steps as the first images and data from this vast trove make the transition from physical to digital.

Blank eye examination form from patient record.

An example of some of the types of data collected in patient records.

New Archives Intern: Maopeli Ali

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We’re happy to welcome new intern Maopeli Ali to Archives & Special Collections. Born and raised in San Francisco, Maopeli is currently a sophomore at Kenyon College in Ohio where he is pursuing a major in biology with a minor in Latin. At Kenyon, he also participates in club rugby and is a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Maopeli is a seasoned intern; he has previously worked at various institutions in the Bay Area, including an architecture firm, the Geology Department of the California Academy of Science, and the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). Maopeli is very ambitious, and is proud to be a First Generation to College student. He plans to attend graduate school after completing his undergraduate studies to pursue a Criminal Justice Master Degree in Forensic Science. His career goal is to become a forensics investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Portrait of Maopeli Ali with San Francisco in the background.

New Archives intern Maopeli Ali

Maopeli comes to us as part of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute Summer Research Program. “This program is designed to provide an opportunity for High School and Undergraduate students to immerse themselves in the world of basic and/or clinical research for three months during the summer. The program pairs students with one or two CHORI principal investigators who serve as mentors, guiding the students through the design and testing of their own hypotheses and methodology development. At the end of the summer, students present their research to their peers just as any professional researcher would do.” As a CHORI intern, Maopeli is mentored by Dr. Aimee Medeiros from the UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine and Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections.

Maopeli will be working on digitizing medical records using our newly-implemented scanning lab purchased with funds from UCSF’s RAP Shared Instrument program. He will then have the opportunity to work with some of this data to formulate a research question which can be addressed by the records.

The Archives are a new experience for Maopeli, whose previous work has mostly focused on biology. He is excited to work in this context, and explore ways in which this study can both help the archives and increase awareness within the health sciences fields about the wealth of historical medical data which is available in the archives and records of large health science universities like UCSF.

Web-Archives at UCSF — Synapse student newspaper

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This is part 1 of a series of blog posts we will put together talking about some of our web-archiving activities at UCSF, and examining some of the changes in University web presences over the years we’ve been collecting them. How many parts will there be? We don’t know yet! The possibilities are endless, so we’ll just have to see where it takes us.

By way of some introduction, we here at Archives & Special Collections have been collecting website captures since about 2009. Initially we used a service maintained by California Digital Library called WAS (Web-Archiving Service), but we now use the Internet Archives Archive-It service to capture sites. We plan to use a later post to go into more detail about how Archive-It works, but for this blog post it suffices to know that Archive-It contains the technology that crawls the web-sites and saves them on the Internet Archives servers just down the road at their Clement St. headquarters.

So why do we do this? Currently, much of the history of the University and its various buildings, people, and internal organizations are all published on the web, so examining that history in the future will include looking at these web-sites to assess the way things have changed.

As an example, let’s look at the web page for Synapse, the UCSF Student Newspaper. Even since 2009, we can see significant changes in the look and feel of the web page, and can begin to tease out historical questions from the design and content of the pages.

Synapse home page in 2009. It looks pretty simple, and all the information is pretty static.

Synapse home page in 2011. It’s gone through a redesign, and perhaps looks a bit more like a newspaper now. It also contains some interesting pre-formatted search bars at the top right.

Already questions begin to emerge. Why did the staff institute search starting in 2011? And did the interesting “How Do I?” pre-formatted search bar get added to the page as a result of identified need for such searches? (I had never seen it before this)

Synapse home page in 2013. It now contains a slideshow on the cover page, and has gone to a darker look.

Synapse home page in 2015. It retains the same look, appears to have moved to a new slideshow technology, and just so happens to feature Dr. Atul Butte at the very beginning of his current position at the University.

Between 2013 and 2015 the paper got a new look for its home page, and introduced slide shows for the first time. Additionally the paper gained a “login” option in 2013 but that had been removed again by 2015 — perhaps a brief memory of the everything-must-be-social media phase of design. It’s also the first time that advertisements have appeared directly on the front page of the paper.

In these documents we can also begin to see the rise of precision medicine and computational health sciences at UCSF, and it’s clear that by 2015 the University was ramping up investment, and that this translated directly to the content of the newspaper as well.

Synapse home page in 2017. It now reflects the design we are used to with most sites we visit.

And finally the page today is in line with much of the design we are used to seeing at our most commonly-visited sites. Synapse also happens to be going back to the archives themselves in this latest update, and pulling content which is just distant enough to have a historical feel.

The aesthetic changes in the page also mirror the aesthetic trajectories of the way we think health and the health sciences should “look”. It makes sense that they’ve gone back to a mostly white color scheme — you’d have a hard time finding a contemporary web page for a hospital or health provider with a dark color scheme now.

Sometimes it can be hard to consider web pages as historical artifacts because we are so close to them, but we are now reaching a point where the first web pages we have collected look foreign enough to us that they are beginning to seem more worthy of study. And we’ve barely even mentioned the wealth of data about the way we communicate which is contained in our web-archives and which can be accessed and assessed with new computational historical methods.

You can find all the UCSF web-archives here: https://archive-it.org/organizations/986

What research will you do with them?

A Report Back from Personal Digital Archiving 2017

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Post by Charlie Macquarie, UCSF Archives Digital Archivist

I spent most of last week down the peninsula for the convening of the Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) conference, now in its 7th year, and left with some fascinating thoughts and conversations in my mind. PDA “seeks to host a discussion across domains focusing on how to best manage personal digital material, be it at a large institution or in a home office.” As a result of this focus, it also ends up playing host to all kinds of fascinating new practices and approaches to collecting, preserving, providing access to, and even thinking about personal digital information.

archivists use smart phones to photograph an 8 inch floppy disk reader.

A moment from the Born-Digital Archiving pre-PDA meetup, where archivists hover around a computer built to read 8 inch floppy disks — an almost impossible task these days

The conference covered a huge range of work, and included presentations on different ways to conceptualize digital space (screenshots, video game emulations, the list goes on), projects seeking to allow communities to directly transfer their digital materials to a library collection through apps or interfaces, and even a fascinating assessment of the way that teens store and access information about their personal finances (including the clincher that almost all ages show a tendency to simply discard financial information after a stated financial goal has been reached). Also included were some updates on the sustainability (or lack of it) of some of the field’s pioneering digital archives projects, like the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University (hint, it’s still people, not machines, that are making it run).

Some presentations particularly interesting to a health sciences institution like our own were those on the self-collection and assessment of health and other biometric data espoused by the Quantified Self movement. Quantified Self is a loosely-organized group who collect and store data about themselves, and then use various computational and creative methods to analyze that data  for self-insights framed as citizen science.

A slide shows in a darkened room as a person gives a presentation on "QS" or Quantified Self.

Gary Wolf gives the keynote on the Quantified Self movement.

Quantified Self (the formal organization) has just embarked on its first experiment to facilitate participants testing and analyzing their own blood, which has brought up a host of questions on the ethics of collecting and making public one’s own health data. Additionally, the project raises questions about the freedoms and constraints that tend to coalesce around these projects of “do it yourself” self-quantification (not to mention the often neglected questions around power and privilege that tinge the conversation around collection of, access to, and work with self-referential data). The approach taken by quantified self practitioners is surely different than ours here in the archives, but we still face similar issues as archivists in a health-sciences university, where historical information mixes with personal narrative and private health data – both in the legal sense and the intimate emotional sense as well.

This forum was a fascinating opportunity to dig a bit deeper into the ideologies and practices behind the collection and preservation of personal digital material, and it seemed fitting that these questions were being explored in dialogue with all the people in the room. One of the biggest takeaways from the conference, after all, was that the tools and technologies to facilitate this work are often the focus of the intrigue and excitement, but that it’s the people who dedicate their time and resources to the endeavor that keep the whole thing running. Just as the Salman Rushdie Digital Collection requires the work of a cadre of dedicated digital archivists at Emory, the future of our digital past will require serious work by a broad and diverse community of archivists, technologists, historians, fanatics, and citizens.

One of the final audience comments was prescient in this regard: “it seems like what might be missing is a discussion of privilege in these projects.” Indeed, any community of practice is unlikely to persist for long if it doesn’t contain a diversity of interests.