UCSF First Digital Archivist

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Polina Ilieva

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.

Exploring the Bio Files

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

This is a guest post by Joshua Dela Cruz, UCSF Archives Intern.

For the past few months, I have been working as an amateur archivist. My duties in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections have ranged from everything from processing projects to moving heavy boxes filled with books and manuscript collections.

An example of one of my projects is to help inventory the bio files. For this project, I look through a large collection of biographical files of people who have been affiliated with UCSF. These people range from professors, students, physicians and researchers to donors and people who helped build the physical school itself. As I search through what appears to be a never ending collection, I record each person’s name, birth and death dates, profession, notable facts, and their affiliation to the school.

Bio file drawer in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

One of the bio file drawers in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

The purpose of this project is for the UCSF archivists to have a digital record of the enormous collection of profiles. Additionally, in the long run, they will be able to display the information on an online database where the general public can access it. The project helps the archivists easily locate biographical information and the unique archival material inside the folders.

Bio file of Ichitaro Katsuki, UC School of Medicine graduate, 1896.

Bio file of Ichitaro Katsuki, 1896 UC School of Medicine graduate.

This project has been especially interesting to me because I’m considering a career in the medical field. Half of the bio files project includes reading about the lives of the people, many of them physicians, and their achievements. As a result, I found myself learning about the history of medicine, UCSF, and the school’s amazing physicians and students. Oftentimes, I would read entire biographies or even search more information about the people and work that fascinated me.

Bio file of Benjamin Gross.

Although the work can be repetitive and meticulous, I have enjoyed my time as an intern. After learning about and working behind the scenes of an archive, I have gained a great appreciation for the profession and the people. It has been a very enlightening experience for me, especially in regards to my possible career paths in the future, and I am thankful for the archivists who welcomed and guided me these past few months.

Searching Tobacco Archives: Sports and Chewing Tobacco

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

This is a guest post by Allen Smoot, UCSF Archives Intern.

As an intern for the UCSF Archives, I’ve been working on digitized state medical society journals and tobacco control collections. At UCSF, the Archives and the Industry Documents Library both house immense collections of tobacco-related material. In the Industry Documents Library there are millions of documents from tobacco companies about their manufacturing, marketing, and scientific research. I narrowed in on chewing tobacco and how it became popular in the sporting world.

Image from “The case against smokeless tobacco: five facts for the health professional to consider,” September 1980, page 4.

Smokeless tobacco gained popularity in the United States in part because many jobs prohibited workers from smoking on site. Advertising also played a role; for example, an article in 1980 outlined the various ways that tobacco companies targeted college campuses and youths through their advertising for chewing tobacco. A report in 1984 cited that in Atlanta, 11% of sample elementary and high school students regularly used snuff.

In the sports world, the numbers could be higher. The same 1984 report, for instance, noted that in a Texas sample, one in every three varsity college athletes on baseball or football teams took two to eight dips per day. Sports idols like Sparky Lyle, former ace pitcher for the New York Yankees and Texas Rangers, contributed to chewing tobacco usage by serving as spokespersons for tobacco companies. Lyle promoted Levi Garrett pouch chewing tobacco on TV by claiming, “Most ball players dream about making it to the Hall of Fame, but I’d be satisfied for people just to remember me as the guy with the great chewing tobacco.”

Image from “The case against smokeless tobacco: five facts for the health professional to consider,” September 1980, page 3.

Smokeless tobacco was advertised as “macho” by sports figures which led to the increase in use by younger people (“Smokeless tobacco is ‘burning’ young athletes,” 1981).

You can read more documents related to smokeless tobacco online in the Industry Documents Library and in the State Medical Society Journals Collection. You can also visit the UCSF Archives and view the Tobacco Control Archives.

St. Joseph College of Nursing

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

Recently, we’ve been adding material to our digital collections on Calisphere.org. One highlight is the St. Joseph College of Nursing Collection.

Nuns gathered around an iron lung. St. Joseph College of Nursing collection.

The digital collection includes selected images from the St. Joseph College of Nursing papers and Alumni Association records. St. Joseph College of Nursing was established in 1921 as an affiliate of St. Joseph’s Hospital. The hospital was founded in San Francisco in 1889 by five Catholic sisters of the Order of Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Though the hospital and school closed in the late 1970s, the Alumni Association continued activity until 2015.

Promotional cards for St. Joseph’s Hospital, San Francisco. The hospital and college buildings were located on the 300 block of Buena Vista Avenue East. St. Joseph College of Nursing collection.

Sister M. Frida and researchers in the Pathology Laboratory, circa 1939. St. Joseph College of Nursing collection.

The collection documents the educational activities of the school as well as the patient care and research performed by the sisters and students. Visit the digital collection to view more images or make an appointment with us to view the material in person.

Nurse with child in St. Joseph’s Hospital Pediatric Ward, circa 1940-1960. St. Joseph College of Nursing collection.

St. Joseph’s Hospital Pharmacy, circa 1940-1960. St. Joseph College of Nursing collection.

New Faces in Archives: Fall 2016

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

We are continuing our collaboration with the University of San Francisco and in particular, Dr. Kathryn Nasstrom, chair of the History Department and her students. This fall semester we are hosting Joshua Dela Cruz and Allen Smoot who are enrolled in the History Internship Program. This program allows students to gain valuable real-world experience and course credit while helping archives staff to accomplish numerous projects that will benefit our patrons and general public.

Joshua Dela Cruz

Joshua Dela Cruz
Joshua is currently working on several projects including organizing and creating a metadata of a manuscript collection of AIDS periodicals and updating and digitizing a photograph collection of portraits. He has also assisted in smaller tasks such as taking inventory, organizing a digital list of metadata, and taking a survey of various other collections and items kept here in the archives.
Joshua is a 4th year undergraduate student from the University of San Francisco, who will be graduating in the upcoming Spring semester. His strong interest in old artifacts and ancient stories, but also in medicine and the natural sciences has lead him to pursuing a Bachelors of Arts degree in History along with a Natural Science Minor and a Chemistry Minor.
His hobbies are playing video games, watching anime, playing the piano, learning Japanese, and a little bit of creative writing. Although considering pursuing a career in medicine, Joshua plans to take a gap year. During that time, he intends to expand his experience in health care, to do research, to explore his other fields of interest, or possibly go to Japan.

Allen Smoot

Allen Smoot
Allen Smoot is a senior undergrad student at the University of San Francisco. He will be helping with collection processing, cataloging, and researching. Allen looks forward to working on arranging and processing smaller collections, such as Tobacco Control and photograph collections. Allen is also interested in learning the basics of archival theory and practice as well as digitalization and metadata creation. He will also be conducting quality control for digitized materials for the Medical Heritage Liberty state medical journals project.
Allen is a US history major while also playing baseball at the University of San Francisco. He was raised in Moraga, CA. Some of his hobbies include hanging out with friends, watching the San Francisco Giants, and Golden State Warriors. Allen is excited to begin working at the UCSF library and learning from the full time archivists.

Digitized State Medical Journals: Searching “Alcohol” and “Prohibition”

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

This is a guest post by Sophia Lahey, UCSF Archives and Special Collections Intern.

Recently, as part of a larger UCSF Archives and Special Collections digitization project, over 200 medical journals from various state medical associations were digitized and added to the Internet Archive. In order to ensure scan quality, I sifted through thousands of pages to make sure everything was clear enough so that the search function would work properly. As long as the scans are clean, you can search for any word in the entire collection! For instance, I searched the words “alcohol” and “prohibition” and came up with some fascinating results.

The first items that struck me when I started to read through the journals were the ads. In addition to the articles, the ads serve as evidence for historians about how people lived, what was socially acceptable, and what they were interested in buying. In these journals, most of the ads were geared towards doctors, advertising things like medicine, medical instruments, insurance, and even computer management systems.

Connecticut State Medical Journal, March 1952, page 226.

This ad for Dentocain Teething Lotion is from the 1950s. The infant teething medication advertised is 70% alcohol and includes chloroform! By modern medical standards, this product would definitely raise some red flags. As I kept looking through more journals, I noticed that the older ones featured alcohol in many of the medicines advertised.

Colorado Medicine, 1927.

In this ad, though the ingredients aren’t listed, you can see on the bottle that the medicine contains 7 1/2% alcohol. The ad was published in 1927, during prohibition. So how could medicine contain alcohol when it was illegal? Well, alcohol could still be prescribed by a doctor. Like other medications, a doctor had to fill out a prescription in order for a patient to get items, like whiskey, for medicinal reasons.

Prescription form for one pint of medicinal whiskey, March 17, 1930. Robert Day Collection, MSS 2011-23.

Some doctors wrote prescriptions for liquor off record and for a profit. This created a controversy – government legislation vs. the rights of the practitioner to prescribe as much as he or she felt was needed. This lead to court cases as well as strongly worded opinion pieces about said court cases and ethics in the medical community. These opinion pieces as well as other news stories can be read in the medical journals in the UCSF collection.

Highlights from the Photograph Collection – Radiology Department

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

Our extensive Historical Photograph Collection includes some really fascinating images. Check out these from the UCSF Radiology Department.

Radon extraction equipment, 1924. Photograph by H.J. Armstrong. Photograph collection, SM, Department of Radiology

Verso: “Interior of University of California Hospital; Equipment used for the extraction of radon – an element formed by the disintegration of radium,” 1924. Photograph by H.J. Armstrong. Photograph collection, SM, Department of Radiology.

Cobalt machine, 1963. Instrument used to administer radiation therapy, often used for cancer treatment. Photograph by Cal-Pictures. Photograph collection, R, Radiology Therapy.

Students Debbie Modeiros and Nat Rutherford radiologic technology training school practice with doll, 1969. Photograph collection, R, Radiology Technology School.

Students Debbie Modeiros and Nat Rutherford, in the Radiologic Technology Training School, practicing with doll, 1969. Photograph collection, R, Radiology Technology School.

EMI Scanner; verso: "The EMI scanner is an example of recent technological advances that reduces patient X-ray exposure while providing more accurate diagnosis than obtainable with older X-ray machines. Here technician Mary McNally and secretary Penny Foster, as patient, demonstrate the giant 2 1/2 ton machine which diagnoses brain disorders." Photograph by Juan Saenz. Photograph collection, R, Radiology CT and EMI scanning.

EMI Scanner, 1975. Verso: “The EMI scanner is an example of recent technological advances that reduces patient X-ray exposure while providing more accurate diagnosis than obtainable with older X-ray machines. Here technician Mary McNally and secretary Penny Foster, as patient, demonstrate the giant 2 1/2 ton machine which diagnoses brain disorders.” Photograph by Juan Saenz. Photograph collection, R, Radiology CT and EMI scanning.

Highlights from the State Medical Society Journals digitization project

Posted on July 14, 2016 by David Krah

We’ve become somewhat accustomed to seeing “smoking doctor” pictures, typically the product of tobacco advertising cynically appealing to authority. The above image comes from a naturalistic setting however, depicting pathologist Dr. Harrison Martland (see table of contents below) at work.

Dr. Martland is featured on the cover of the January 1984 edition of the Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey (Vol. 81 no. 1), digitized by the Internet Archive as part of the NEH grant-funded project to digitize many of our state medical society journals.

The journal lacks any commentary on the smoking but does lead us to an article on the analysis of Dr. Martland’s historical autopsy records performed at Newark City Hospital from 1908 to 1911.

The author draws some interesting conclusions about the safety and violence of Newark from Dr. Martland’s records, but perhaps one of the most interesting details is his attempt to record all his findings in Latin! He gave up eventually, doubtless making the author’s analysis that little bit easier.

Check out this and many other journals from our collection and four other libraries at the Internet Archive’s State Medical Society Journals project page. Expect continued updates to the collection throughout the year.

Summer 2016 Interns

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

This summer the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is hosting two interns who are working on diverse projects.

Sophia Lahey

Sophia Lahey is helping with the manuscript collections survey project, updating the metadata for historic photographs and documents that are posted on Calisphere, and assisting with quality control of volumes digitized for the State Medical Society Journals project.
Sophia is currently a student at Sonoma State University majoring in history and liberal arts. She lives with her parents in Marin county. In the fall she will be moving to Japan to study Japanese language and work towards a history major with concentration in Asian studies.

In her free time she pursues photography and spends time with her friends. She also enjoys video games as a hobby. She is excited to get experience working with historical documents and archives management systems to help her in the future with her history major.

For the first time we are working with the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) 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.” Our CHORI intern, Laura Schafer is co-mentored by Drs. Aimee Medeiros and Brian Dolan from the UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine and Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections.

Laura Schafer

As an undergrad senior student of Psychology and more recently also Pedagogy at UC Berkeley, Laura Schafer is deeply interested in research fields related to pediatrics and healthcare associated to socioeconomic status (SES) factors. She believes that having grown up experiencing the consequences of Brazil’s developing societal reality while having juvenile diabetes plays a significant influence on what has developed into the focus of her academic career by far. She is mostly concerned with the consequences of low socioeconomic status (SES) factors potentially interfering with treatment affordability and proper healthcare practices for chronically ill children’s mental, emotional. and physical health.

Although Laura has had the chance to acquire some fundamental research-enabling skills through involvement as an RA at the UC Berkeley Emotion and Social Interaction Laboratory and also from participating in an honors’ thesis developing program through her University’s department of pedagogy, Laura seeks further training and mentoring in the principles underlying conducts of research through her internship at UCSF. She is very enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with the UCSF mentors. The project Laura is involved with during her internship this summer aims to assist with the digitization and creation of metadata for the historical patient data from the 1920’s to 1960’s which includes pediatric records.

Internet Archive Partners Lunch

Posted on June 6, 2016 by David Krah

Friday the 13th of May was the auspicious date of our visit to one of our partner organizations, the Internet Archive, just across Golden Gate Park in the Richmond District. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library of millions of freely accessible books, movies, software, music, websites and more. Internet Archive graciously hosts a bi-weekly Partners Lunch, inviting anyone working in partnership with IA to tour the facility (a gorgeous re-purposed Christian Science church), meet staff in person, and participate in a lunchtime roundtable where IA folks and visitors share their projects’ progress, successes and failures. The whole UCSF Archives team, plus UCSF collections staff members Beatrice Mallek and David MacFarland, were in attendance.

UCSF Archives and Special Collections staff with Internet Archive digitization staff.

We met with our IA liason Jesse Bell, who gave us a look into the progress of some of our projects ongoing at Internet Archive. Here Eliza Zhuang is using a specially designed scanning booth to digitize volumes of bound medical journals for the State Medical Journal project. The “scanner” actually uses two conventional DSLR cameras to simultaneously photograph the pages of the book, optimally positioned by the pedal-operated V-shaped glass plate shown here.

Eliza Zhuang scanning a medical journal from UCSF’s collection.

After photography, the images undergo QA and metadata association before being uploaded to the Internet Archive, where they look like this.

IA’s lobby provides plenty of excitement. A prominently displayed monitor shows the digitization currently underway on a number of different systems. Below, David Uhlich watches as pages from the book scanner are photographed. Immediately behind the monitor is a film scanner that similarly feeds the live-view monitor. The lobby also houses a beautiful antique gramophone near a small listening station that includes an iPad loaded with digitized music and other recorded sound.

David Uhlich observes the progress of digitized images entering the system.

After lunch, we took a more in depth tour of IA’s facility. We saw an example of IA’s specially designed “portable” book scanner, which is basically a scaled-down version of the one used by IA staff. Approximately $10,000 will get you your own book scanning station, software, and support from IA for your own scanning projects. We also looked inside the refurbished church that, in addition to the pews, now houses some of IA’s servers and digitization equipment.

Internet Archive servers occupy a niche.

Sculptures of miniature people inhabit the aisles. Long-term IA staff are thanked for their service with a sculpture of their likeness; many depicted holding an item that reflects their interests or passions.

Some of Internet Archive’s long-term staff immortalized in figurine form.

It was great to meet the IA team in person. Our partnership with IA continues to provide new opportunities to preserve and make accessible our material. We look forward to exciting projects in the future!

Brought to Light

Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections

Category Archives: Digital Projects