J. Michael Bishop Papers Online

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

We are pleased to announce that the J. Michael Bishop Papers digital collection is now available publicly on Calisphere.org. Bishop is a Nobel Prize-winning researcher and UCSF Chancellor Emeritus. The digital collection features hundreds of pages of material and photographs selected from Bishop’s papers housed in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (MSS 2007-21).

J. Michael Bishop college portrait, Gettysburg College, circa 1955. MSS 2007-21, box 1, folder 4.

J. Michael Bishop portrait with molecular model, circa 2000. MSS 2007-21, case D, folder 1.

J. Michael Bishop, MD, joined the UCSF faculty in 1968. He was appointed director of the GW Hooper Research Foundation in 1981 and named UCSF Chancellor in 1998, a post he held until 2009. He continues to serve as Hooper’s director and as professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

J. Michael Bishop email to Harold Varmus regarding Bishop’s University of California, San Francisco Chancellor appointment, 1998-02-06. MSS 2007-21, carton 18, folder 43.

In 1989, Bishop and his research partner, Harold Varmus, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in cancer research. Bishop and Varmus discovered the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Their work helped clarify the processes that convert normal cellular genes into cancer genes and impacted our understanding of the genesis of human cancer.

J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus at Nobel Shindig, a county-western themed dinner party given by Varmus and Bishop in celebration of their Nobel Prize award; held at DeMarco’s 23 Club, Brisbane, California, 1989. MSS 2007-21, carton 8, folder 41.

The digital collection features selections from Bishop’s laboratory research notebooks and professional papers, including article drafts, correspondence with other scientists, and teaching and lecture material. Also included are photographs and draft figures created by Bishop for his publications.

Purification of Annealed Product Gd RNA graphs. Selected page from a laboratory research binder of J. Michael Bishop, circa 1970. MSS 2007-21, carton 18, folder 3.

The Life Cycle of Rous Sarcoma Virus diagram drawing (1) by J. Michael Bishop; created for Bishop’s article “Oncogenes” published in Scientific American, 1982. MSS 2007-21, carton 2, folder 2.

You can view the digital collection on Calisphere.org. If you would like to visit the UCSF Archives and work with the complete physical collection, please check out the detailed inventory available on the Online Archive of California and make an appointment with us.

New Collections on Calisphere

Posted on April 27, 2016 by David Krah

Earlier this year the California Digital Library revealed a revamped Calisphere site, offering improved access to and usability for thousands of digital items of historical significance contributed by institutions from across California. Alongside University of California partners such as UCSF, California State University Libraries, public libraries, museums and historical societies are making digital resources more discoverable than ever. The Calisphere site itself features excellent search and filter functions, and items can also be discovered through the Digital Public Library of America and even through Google searches.

UCSF is currently adding items and collections to the site, beginning with newly digitized items from the Eric Berne Papers, Lawrence Crooks Radiologic Imaging Laboratory Records and the UCSF Black Caucus Records. Other collections include the Japanese Woodblock Print Collection, the Tobacco Free Project (SF Department of Public Health Records), and selections from UCSF’s Photograph Collection. We’re also moving items over from our Omeka site so that all of UCSF’s digitized items can be accessed in one place.

The release of the new Calisphere site also coincides with the implementation of a new Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) connected to Calisphere, that with help from CDL, allows us to have an efficient workflow for managing, preserving and publishing digital items.

You can find UCSF’s collections through the “Contributing Institutions” link at the top of the page. Each collection features a gallery view with thumbnails of the items, with options to filter and sort search results and sets by an number of different facets including date, item type and collection number.

Calisphere’s new user-friendly features include clearly laid-out item information and a nice co-mingling of academic and social media functions to “Get Citation” “Tweet” and “Share on Facebook”. There are also helpful links back to the Contributing Institution page and Collection page and links to the finding aid on the Online Archive of California. The new design is very easily searchable, navigable and easy on the eyes.

We’ll have more items coming online in the next month or so keep an eye out. Take a look around the site, send us your feedback and enjoy!

UCSF Archives Coloring Book

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

We created a coloring book featuring illustrations from fifteenth to nineteenth-century rare books housed in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections. Coloring reduces stress, inspires creativity, and it’s just plain fun. You can scroll through a few of the images below and download the entire book for free here. Happy coloring!

We would love to see your finished creations. Tweet your pictures @ucsf_archives and use #ColorOurCollections.

Ketham, Joannes de. The Fasciculo di medicina, Venice. 1493. Find it at the UCSF Library: ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1121554~S0

Ketham, Joannes de. The Fasciculo di medicina, Venice, 1493. ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1121554~S0

Konrad, von Megenberg. Buch der Natur. 1482. Find it at the UCSF Library: ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1074494~S0

Konrad, von Megenberg. Buch der Natur, 1482. ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1074494~S0

Ryff, Walther Hermenuis. Omnium humani corporis partium… 1541. Find it at the UCSF Library: ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1063757~S0

Ryff, Walther Hermenuis. Omnium humani corporis partium…, 1541.
ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1063757~S0

Hortus Sanitatis. 1491. Find it at the UCSF Library: ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1015734~S0

Hortus Sanitatis, 1491. ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b1015734~S0

Bartisch, Georg. Ophthalmodouleia. 1583. ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b2286634~S0

Download the complete UCSF Archives and Special Collections Coloring Book

New Interns in Archives

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

During the 2016 Spring semester the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is hosting two interns:

Jessica Jones

Jessica Jones is our first EXCEL program intern. The UC San Francisco Excellence through Community Engagement & Learning (EXCEL) Program is a clerical/administrative training program which aims to develop the potential workforce in UCSF’s surrounding communities and provide San Francisco residents with access to health-field related employment opportunities. It is a work-based program that uses both classroom and on-the-job training to prepare participants for career path jobs in the healthcare sector. In the past month Jessica who works in the Archives four days a week has successfully completed the State Medical Society Journals assessment and Cholera pamphlets cataloging projects. She is working on rehousing and creating detailed inventory for the Photo Portraits collection which will help preserve these photographs and facilitate their discovery. Jessica will help organize, rehouse and create inventories for newly acquired papers and also learn how to scan and create metadata for materials in diverse formats.

Here is what Jessica wrote for the blog: “I am a mother of two beautiful children ages 1 and 4. I am a San Francisco native and a current intern through the EXCEL Cycle 10 UCSF Medical Administrative Internship. After becoming a mother I realized what I was inspired and motivated by. I have many talents and desires but my main four passions in life are Children, Happiness, Self Love, and Fashion. Due to my natural spirit to connect and adapt with people so well I have a goal to become a professional as a Clinical Social Worker in Pediatrics. I am one step closer to my future by getting my foot in the door within my internship at UCSF. I plan to reach out and advocate for families that lack social and emotional support. I want to make a difference within children and actually give and instill in them extra love, support, and mentoring . Currently I am interning for the Archives and Special Collections, I plan to enrich my own knowledge and gain plenty experience to become an unparalleled asset. I also plan to look into the development of pediatrics department within UCSF. Finally, I am so thankful for this amazing opportunity. My dream is becoming a reality.”

Kristin Daniel

Kristin Daniel first became interested in library science when she was young; when her curiosity, more often than not, led her to find answers in books. The importance of information availability stayed with her throughout her schooling. Her passion was put on hold after she graduated high school in 1998, as economic necessities led her to a decade of service in the retail and hospitality industries. She got the opportunity to return to school and pursue her dream in 2008.

She graduated cum laude from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and is currently in her last semester of San Jose State University’s iSchool Masters in Library and Information Science program. Her coursework at SJSU reflects her interest in public librarianship with an emphasis in archives and preservation. Kristin is hopeful that she can serve her community’s information needs with the skills she can learn at her internship at UCSF: practical experience in cataloging, collection processing, and digitization. With so many people turning to digital means of finding information she is a firm proponent of a global library network.

Between being a stay-at-home-mom and a full time grad student, Kristin doesn’t have a lot of time for hobbies. When she can find a few moments to relax, however, she can usually be found reading sci-fi/fantasy novels, exploring San Francisco’s numerous events/attractions, and daydreaming about winning the lottery so she can build a craft studio. A lifelong California resident, Kristin currently resides in San Ramon with her husband and two-year-old son.

Kristin is continuing the project started by previous interns – organizing and creating an inventory of biographical files. She also helps with Quality Control of digital files for the State Medical Society Journals project.

Both Jessica and Kristin are assisting with the survey of the Archives and Special Collections manuscript and university records collections. The inventory and reorganization of these collections will greatly increase intellectual control, department efficiency, and user access.

We are grateful to our interns for their dedication and help!

Joint Project to Digitize State Medical Society Journals, 1900 – 2000 Funded

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Polina Ilieva

The UCSF Library is collaborating with four other preeminent medical libraries on a project to digitize and make publicly accessible state medical journals. The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital resource on the history of medicine and health developed by an international consortium of cultural heritage repositories, has received funding in the amount of $275,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its proposal “Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society.“ Additional funding has been provided by the Harvard Library.

Illustration for the article by Charles Kirkland Roys, M.D., published in the California State Journal of Medicine, Vol. XI, No.3, March 1913, page 116.

The project will create a substantial digital collection of American state medical society journals, digitizing 117 titles from 46 states, from 1900 to 2000, comprising 2,500,369 pages in 3,579 volumes. State medical society journal publishers agreed to provide free and open access to journal content currently under copyright. Once digitized, journals will join the more than 75,000 monographs, serials, pamphlets, and films now freely available in the MHL collection on the Internet Archive. Full text search is available through the MHL website . MHL holdings can also be accessed through the Digital Public Library of America – DPLA, and the Wellcome Library’s UK-MHL.

Illustration for an article by Eugene S. Kilgore, M.D., published in the California State Journal of Medicine, Vol. XIII, No.12, December 1915, page 464.

Illustration for the article by Eugene S. Kilgore, M.D., published in the California State Journal of Medicine, Vol. XIII, No.12, December 1915, page 464.

State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine in the twentieth century at both the local and national level. The journals have served as sites not only for scientific articles, but for medical talks (and, often, accounts of discussions following the talks), local news regarding sites of medical care and the medical profession, advertisements, and unexpurgated musings on medicine and society throughout the 20th century. When digitized and searchable as a single, comprehensive body of material, this collection will be able to support a limitless array of historical queries, including those framed geographically and/or temporally, offering new ways to examine and depict the evolution of medicine and the relationship between medicine and society.

UCSF is collaborating on this project with: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine; and the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus (UMB). The participants are currently reviewing their holdings, establishing workflows and will start digitizing the volumes this fall (UCSF holdings will be sent to the Internet Archive scanning facility in San Francisco); the project will be completed in April 2017.

Quick Guide to Research Tools

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Kelsi Evans

Summer is officially here and with it comes research trips! Whether you are set on visiting the UCSF Archives and Special Collections or just getting started on your plans, the UCSF Library has a number of tools that can help. Take a look at the following list and please contact us if you have any questions.

Search for archival material and rare books:

UCSF Library Catalog – Search our rare book holdings, university archives, manuscript collections (entries include links to finding aids if available), and university publications
Online Archive of California – Browse finding aids for manuscript collections and university archives
Manuscript Collection Projects – Learn more about our collection projects focused on research areas including AIDS history, biotechnology, and tobacco control

View archival material and special collections online:

HathiTrust Digital Collection – Search more than 2,000 digitized UCSF university publications, yearbooks, pamphlets, and books dating from the 16th century through the 2000s
UCSF Digital Collections – Browse historical photographs, exhibits, and digitized documents, including our collection of cholera pamphlets
UCSF Digital Collections on the Internet Archive – View audiovisual material, including Cambodia Protest tapes, oral histories, UCSF events, and lectures
Homeopathy Collection – View selected digitized items from the collection
Industry Documents Digital Library – Search millions of documents about the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries
Japanese Woodblock Print Collection – View our digitized collection of health-related woodblock prints
San Francisco Department of Public Health Reports – Search reports that date from 1873-1901
Synapse Archive – View digitized issues of the UCSF student newspaper, beginning in 1957

Access and Services:

UCSF Archives and Special Collections Homepage – Find hours and contact information, make appointments, view forms and fees and more
About the UCSF Archives and Special Collections – Learn more about our history, collections, and resources

Preserving MRI Developments at UCSF

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Kelsi Evans

For the next year, I’ll be processing the records of the Radiologic Imaging Laboratory (RIL), 1969-2000. This laboratory pioneered advancements in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and helped develop technology that’s now used in hospitals and clinics throughout the world. The collection showcases bioengineering in action and highlights the relationships among industry, research, and education at UCSF.

In process boxes from the RIL records.

RIL founder and electrical engineer Lawrence E. Crooks gifted the collection to the archives in the early 2000s. It includes over 80 cartons of material ranging from lab notebooks with early scan images to patient records and marketing presentations.

Lawrence Crooks lab notebook, 1979-1983. From the RIL records, MSS 2002-08

The material traces the RIL’s growth through different funding agencies and corporate affiliations, including Pfizer, Diasonics, and Toshiba. There are even some personal items, like photographs of lab members celebrating Mardi Gras during a conference in New Orleans!

In process marketing slides from the RIL records. The collection includes various image types, including slides, Polaroids of scan images, negatives, and photographs.

In process marketing slides from the RIL records. The collection includes slides, Polaroids of scan images, negatives, and photographs.

Currently, the collection is cataloged (MSS 2002-08) and has a preliminary inventory, though much of the material lacks intellectual control. My goals are to complete the collection’s processing, create a detailed online finding aid, and digitize a large portion of the material. I will also help curate an exhibit at the UCSF library and a companion online exhibit.

In process tapes from the RIL records. The collection includes various kinds of media, including tapes, floppy disks, and videotapes.

In process tapes from the RIL records. The collection includes tapes, floppy disks, and videotapes.

I’m really excited about the project and hope that it will help users better access the material. The collection is rich in research potential and I can’t wait to see the unique projects it inspires.

Got questions? October 30 Is #AskAnArchivist Day!

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Polina Ilieva

On October 30, archivists around the country will take to Twitter to answer your questions about any and all things archives! This day-long event, sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, will give you the opportunity to connect directly with archivists in your community—and around the country—to ask questions, get information, or just satisfy your curiosity.

Postcard depicting the Affiliated Colleges, San Francisco, California, ca. 1900s

We are eager to respond to diverse questions you have about archives and archival work. Not sure what to ask? Here are a few sample questions we commonly get…

•   Who was the first chancellor of UCSF?
•   When the university was officially named UCSF?
•   How to archive a website?
•   What’s the most unusual thing you’ve come across in your collections?
•   How can I see you collections?
•   How can I volunteer in the archives?
•   Can you help me digitize VHS tapes?
•   I have old dental school yearbooks, can I donate them to archives?

#AskAnArchivist is open to everyone—all you need is a Twitter account! To participate, just tweet a question and include the hashtag #AskAnArchivist in your tweet. Your question will be seen instantly by archivists around the country who are standing by to respond directly to you.
If your questions are specifically for the UCSF archives, be sure to tweet them to @ucsf_archives using the hashtag #AskAnArchivist on October 30th from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
We may not know every answer right away, but we will get back to you after we’ve had the chance to do some digging.
The archives team will be on-hand to answer your questions. Click here to tweet.

100+ Years of UCSF Yearbooks Accessible Online: UCSF Partners with Google Books for Digitization Project

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Polina Ilieva

The UCSF library is an important UC contributor to the Google Books digitization project. Through the collaboration with the California Digital Library (CDL) digitization team 1,317 volumes from the general and rare book collections were scanned and uploaded to Google Books and HathiTrust, a central repository for digital books.

As part of this project, we also digitized the university publications (yearbooks, announcements, departmental newsletters). These materials are among the most heavily used in archives and requested not only by university departments, but also by people doing genealogical research and alumni. As a result, 460 of these volumes are now full-text accessible on Google Books and HathiTrust sites.

Chaff’98, v.2, yearbook of the College of Dentistry, University of California. College of Dentistry baseball team, 1897-98.

With hundreds of volumes digitized proper organization assures quick and efficient discoverability of these treasures by diverse users. With the help of HathiTrust colleagues at CDL and the University of Michigan, we set up two collections:

University of California, San Francisco collection

This collection contains books, pamphlets, UCSF University Publications, and yearbooks dating back from 16th century through 2000s held at the University of California, San Francisco Library and Special Collections.

UCSF University publications

This collection contains materials published by UCSF schools, programs, and research institutes (course catalogs, announcements, student publications, annual reports, newsletters, etc.) as well as yearbooks dating back from 1864 held at the UCSF Archives. Among them is “The Introductory address delivered by Professor H. H.Toland at the Toland Medical College, San Francisco on Monday, October 24, 1864.”

Please read the full story on the UC Libraries web site and CDL blog.

UCSF Library Google Books Team. Front row: Andy Panado, Polina Ilieva, Bea Mallek, Karen Butter. Back row: Eric Peterson, Art Townsend, Alberto Luna, Tyrone McCloskey, Don Ciccone, Bazil Menezes, David Campbell, Anneliese Taylor. Not pictured: Margaret Hughes, Julia Kochi, Bertha Hall, Lucy Friedland, Mark Zanandrea, David MacFarland, Alan Daniel, Jubeda Azam, Deborah Freeze, Susan Boone and Kirk Hudson.

About CDL
The CDL was founded by the University of California in 1997 to take advantage of emerging technologies that were transforming the way digital information was being published and accessed. Since then, in collaboration with the UC libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world’s largest digital research libraries and changed the ways that faculty, students, and researchers discover and access information. In 2006, CDL and the University of California libraries partnered with Google on a project to digitize millions of books from the campus collections.

About HathiTrust
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership, currently comprising more than 90 partner libraries. Over the last six years, the partners have contributed more than 11 million volumes to the digital library. More than 3.7 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web. For more information, visit the HathiTrust About page.

Brought to Light

Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections

Category Archives: Digital Projects