Job Shadowing at the Library

Posted on November 20, 2017 by Kelsi Evans

This is an excerpt of a blog post written by Rebecca Tang, Developer with the Industry Documents Library, a division of the UCSF Archives. Read the full article here.

On Thursday October 26, 2017, the Library and Center for Knowledge Management hosted job shadowing for high school students for the first time!

Two students, Kelly and Jane, both Juniors from Balboa High School, visited us and spent the day learning about what it is like to work as a programmer. Kelly and Jane are part of the Game Design Academy at Balboa High School. The Game Design Academy is the path way for students who are interested in engineering and programming. Kelly and Jane have not had any programming experience yet. They will start programming classes next semester.

They started the day off with a tour of the library with Jim. Then they attended the weekly meeting with the Industry Documents Library team. During the meeting, they learned about about the IDL project, databases, and search index.

Then they attended Illios code jam with the Illios team where they got a front end programming primer from Jason and listened in as the Illios team discussed ways to improve their UI…Continue reading the full job shadowing article on the CKM blog.

Archives Staff Volunteer Day

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Charles Macquarie

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 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 Open Houses

Posted on October 26, 2017 by duhlich

October is coming to a close, and with it our Archives Month festivities, but we still have two open houses in the next week for those who would like to come and check out our reading room and some of our materials:

On Saturday, October 28th, we are participating in the San Francisco Archives Crawl, and our reading room will be open from noon until 5pm. On display will be materials from our collections that document counterculture and protest movements, including records from the UCSF Black Caucus, AIDS History Project materials, and selections from the Tobacco Control Archives.

On Monday, October 30th, we will be holding our 2nd annual Halloween Open House from noon until 3pm, where we will showcase some of our “spooky” holdings. This event is being held in conjunction with the Library Maker’s Lab Halloween event, and we will have a button maker available on the 5th floor for those who would like to create Halloween-themed buttons and magnets based upon materials in our collections.

One of the objects on display for our Halloween Open House is our 1883 edition of the Heinrich Hoffmann children’s book, Der Struwwelpeter (or Shockheaded Peter). The book itself is well-known for its collection of rhyming allegories about the dangers of children misbehaving, such as our title character pictured below, who is named Peter and has some shockingly bad grooming habits.

Bound with our copy of Der Struwwelpeter is an adaption of the same work from 1882 by an Obstetrical-Gynecological society that was evidently distributed at a society dinner. Frighteningly, whoever decided to do the adaption chose to focus on childhood disease, instead of misbehavior, and illustrate each disease with it’s own drawing. Even the “normal child” pictured below is a bit unsettling!

Lecture: 50 Years of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics

Posted on October 4, 2017 by Polina Ilieva

Date: Friday, October 6, 2017
Time: 12 pm – 1:15 pm
Lecturer: David E. Smith, MD
Location: Lange Room, 5th Floor, UCSF Library – Parnassus
530 Parnassus Ave, SF, CA 94143

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: http://calendars.library.ucsf.edu/event/3555516

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Born in the Summer of Love, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, founded by UCSF alumni David E. Smith, MD, and staffed by volunteer medical providers from UCSF, celebrated its 50th anniversary on June 7, 2017.

Join Dr. Smith as he tells the story of the clinic’s founding and the 1960’s Haight-Ashbury luminaries who kept the clinic alive in its early days. He will discuss the clinic’s role in the birth of addiction medicine as a specialty, and the lessons the free clinic movement holds for healthcare reform efforts in the 21st century.

David E. Smith, MD, founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics

David E. Smith, MD, is a medical doctor specializing in addiction medicine, the psycho-pharmacology of drugs, new research strategies in the management of drug abuse problems, and proper prescribing practices for physicians. He is the Founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics of San Francisco.

About the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Lecture Series
UCSF Archives & Special Collections launched this lecture series to introduce a wider community to treasures and collections from its holdings, to provide an opportunity for researchers to discuss how they use this material, and to celebrate clinicians, scientists, and health care professionals who donated their papers to the archives.

#AskAnArchivist Day – October 4

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Kelsi Evans

October 4^th is Ask An Archivist Day! We’ll be diligently tending our Twitter account (@ucsf_archives) and responding to questions about our collections, our jobs, or anything else to do with the stewardship of historical material. Tag your questions with #AskAnArchivist to join the conversation.

For example, you could ask:

Have you found any interesting ephemera or artifacts in the AIDS History Project collections? #AskAnArchivist

And we’d say:

Yes, lots. For instance, the papers of epidemiologist Donald Francis include a 12^th World AIDS Conference condom and Stop AIDS t-shirt.

12th World AIDS Conference condom, 1998. Donald P. Francis papers, MSS 2015-01.

Stop AIDS t-shirt. Donald P. Francis papers, MSS 2015-01.

#AskAnArchivist Day is part of our October Archives Month programming. Learn more about other upcoming events here.

Archives Month — October 2017

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Charles Macquarie

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.

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!

Exhibit Opening: HIV: A Plague of Violence Against Women

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Polina Ilieva

Exhibit Reception: October 4th, 2017, 12 pm to 2 pm

Opening Remarks at 12 pm by Drs. Arthur J. Ammann and Paul Volberding, Larkin Callaghan, PhD

Location: UCSF Parnassus Library, 530 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, 1st Floor Lobby (take the elevator or the stairs to the ground floor), UCSF Shuttles & Parking, Public Transportation

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: http://calendars.library.ucsf.edu/event/3527701

This exhibit will be on view at the UCSF Library from October 4th, 2017 through March 30th, 2018.

Dr. Ammann. No One Is Listening.
Montage: Jiří Cernicky, Schizophrenia. (1998)
Edvard Munch, Maiden and Death. (1894).
Edvard Munch, The Scream. (1893)
Edvard Munch, The Sun. (1912)
Out of the Void, Pacific Ocean
Liquidambar styraciflua (seed pods)

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for the exhibit opening and reception of “HIV: A Plague of Violence Against Women”. This exhibit features a collection of photo montages by Arthur J. Ammann, M.D., a pediatric immunologist and advocate known for his research on HIV transmission and his role in the development of the first successful vaccine to prevent pneumococcal infection in 1977. Dr. Ammann is also the founder of Global Strategies (http://www.globalstrategies.org/) , a nonprofit organization that serves women and children in the most neglected areas of the world where he witnessed not one but two epidemics affecting women —sexual and physical violence and HIV.

Through his surrealist lens, Dr. Ammann’s photo montages document the suffering he witnessed during his time working with HIV infected women in Africa. The world of art has been a refuge for Dr. Ammann since his childhood. The creations of great artists spoke to him about the unrelenting violence against women, the struggle between good and evil, and the valley of the shadow of death. Paintings by Blake, Bosch, Giotto, Kahlo, Munch, Caravaggio, Titian, Dali, Freud, Nerdrum, and Picasso, resonated with what he felt from his experiences.

For over a decade he put the images together, took them apart, and put them together again. The title of each photo montage is accompanied by a quote or words, many derived from the stories women told. These images are a collective demand that “Violence against women must be stopped.”

Dr. Ammann with collagues

The exhibit is also a call to action for Dr. Ammann: “We must never accept violence and injustice nor ignore its enduring wounds. We can create new voices and images for advocacy. We can move to repair the physical, emotional, and spiritual scars that remain. We can provide inexpensive and easy to use medicines to prevent the complications of rape―HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancy.”

We invite you to explore this visually arresting exhibit in support of Dr. Ammann’s efforts to end violence against women.

Intern Report: Archive Your Pride Event Planning

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Kelsi Evans

This is a guest post by Anida Hodzic, UCSF Archives Intern.

Being an intern is hard work, especially at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections. During my summer internship, I was assigned the difficult task of helping my supervisor (Kelsi Evans) prepare for the Archive Your Pride Button Making Pop Up at the UCSF Makers Lab. To begin, we searched for images that would work on a button. I know what you’re thinking, that seems easy enough…The difficulty came in the amount of amazing images, posters, pamphlets, and other ephemera we came across.

My collage of some of the images from the collections.

UCSF digital collections on Calisphere, including the AIDS History Project Ephemera Collection and the Bobby Campbell Diary, were full of relatable and interesting content. We also went down to the vault and sifted through some un-digitized material. After we selected the images, we tried to make a few sample buttons. One of my fellow interns and I spent about an hour in the Makers Lab trying to make buttons without reading the directions. Thus we made a simple task complicated and confusing. Once we finally figured out that following directions was a good thing, the pride buttons came pouring out of the button maker.

The event the next day was worth all of our hard work. The turn out was awesome and people loved our images, glitter, and stickers. It was great fun to see everyone support Pride, the Archives, the Makers Lab, and each other’s creativity. The buttons were cool, the atmosphere warm, and my summer internship was fun and successful.

Intern Report: Creating an Exhibit

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Kelsi Evans

This is a guest post by Caitlin Toomey, UCSF Archives Intern

Hello, readers! My name is Caitlin Toomey and I was fortunate to be an intern at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections during spring semester. I am currently in the process of receiving my master’s degree in museum studies at USF. Since high school, I have either worked or interned at multiple museums and galleries throughout California, but my time at UCSF stood out as a unique and valuable experience.

While an intern, I was responsible for many different tasks and worked on a number of exciting exhibits. What stood out to me about this internship was the amount of skills I was able to gain and perform throughout the process. For the majority of my internship, I focused on the current exhibit on display in the Library, “DO THE BEST FOR OUR SOLDIERS:” University of California Medical Service in World War I. It was during this time that I completed many different duties.

I began by researching specific subjects, such as the influenza outbreak in 1918 and how troops were entertained on the front, which would be used in the exhibition as stand alone displays. I also wrote the labels with other curators for the exhibit. This was a valuable experience because I mostly have a background in education and collections, so working on more curatorial skills was very helpful. Additionally, collaboratively writing labels can be a challenging but educational experience, and as a result helped me with my writing skills.

WWI exhibit case, “Finding Time to Unwind,” on display in the UCSF Library.

Along with assisting in curation, I was also able to work on exhibit design and collections management for “DO THE BEST FOR OUR SOLDIERS”. I most enjoyed this part of the process because I was able to pick out artifacts for a number of the displays. Looking through the UCSF Archives and Special Collections storage was absolutely fascinating. The collection has so much to explore and discover on the shelves and stacks that I was never at a loss when looking for objects to display. I was also lucky enough to select and help place objects for a number of other special exhibits during my tenure, such as the UCSF Alumni Weekend artifact display of unique health science artifacts and the UCSF Cornerstone demolition series.

WWI-era U.S. Army Medical Department medicine kit used in the exhibit. From the UCSF Archives Artifact Collection, item 218.

Overall, I can look back on my time at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections as a very positive and educational experience. Not many internships give the opportunity to play a large role in exhibitions, as well as learn many different skills that will become valuable for a successful career. I know that I will take with me the many lessons I learned during these past few months. This was a wholly gratifying internship and I will cherish it throughout my career.

Archive Your Pride Button Making

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Kelsi Evans

In celebration of SF Pride 2017, the UCSF Archives and the Makers Lab are hosting a button making pop up event! Join us tomorrow, June 20th, from 12noon-2pm in the UCSF Library Makers Lab and create buttons that represent your pride. We’ll have reproductions of archival material, including photographs, flyers and ephemera from LGBTQ community and health advocacy groups, historical marches and events, and more. Get creative and celebrate diversity with us!

REGISTER HERE

A sneak peek at some of the images, courtesy of our interns!

Special thanks to our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Archives for inspiring us with their own Pride Month button making event and historical display!

Brought to Light

Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections

Category Archives: Events