Base Hospital No. 30, One-Hundred Years Later, Part Four: The People

This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, PhD student, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine.

Figure 19 - San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, November 11, 1918

Figure 19 – San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, November 11, 1918

One hundred years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the “war to end all wars” effectively came to an end as the Armistice went into effect. This momentous occasion would go on to be celebrated bas a national holiday in Britain, France, and the United States, where Armistice Day eventually expanded to honor the service of all veterans. With the centenary of the Armistice, it is worth reflecting on both the end of the First World War and on what it means to honor veterans’ service.

As a veteran myself, the phrase “thank you for your service” can at times feel like a platitude. It seems assumptive on many levels. Most often, those expressing that sentiment are strangers who have no knowledge of the details or motives of a given veteran’s service. And that can lead to difficult, guarded, or awkward conversation to follow. For the veteran’s part, it may be difficult to convey the multiple and complex layers of what our service means to us. A gulf can thus form between veterans and civilians, and that’s a shame.

As a historian, it is my sincere hope that the exploration of the past can provide useful insight in the present and future. By exploring veterans’ experiences in detail, we may be able to get past the platitudes and patriotic veneer and achieve a better understanding of what veterans’ service means. So it is my genuine privilege to present this brief account of the unit from the University of California School of Medicine during the First World War—the final part of a four-part series on the remarkable men and women who served with Base Hospital No. 30.

Figure 20 - "U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I (University of California School of Medicine Unit)," from The Thirtieth, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 20 – “U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I (University of California School of Medicine Unit),” from The Thirtieth, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Base Hospital Thirty resulted from the Army’s effort to provide the best medical care the United States had to offer to its fighting men in the Great War. When it became apparent that America was likely to enter the war that had been raging since the summer of 1914, the American Red Cross (ARC) began coordinating with the nation’s leading medical schools to help the Army prepare for the war by organizing hospital units. Shortly after the declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, the ARC approached the University of California School of Medicine to organize one such unit and was received with enthusiasm.

Figure 21 - "Liberty Loan Parade," AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 21 – “Liberty Loan Parade,” AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Twenty-five medical officers, sixty-five nurses, and one-hundred-fifty enlisted men marched down Market Street as part of a highly successful Liberty Loan parade to raise money for the unit and to support the war effort. The Red Cross secured $100,000 to purchase supplies to outfit the hospital unit. Several of the nurses, enlisted personnel, and at least one officer were so eager to go to France that they quit their jobs and packed their belongings in anticipation of a quick deployment. But that initial enthusiasm soon bogged down in the realities of Army bureaucracy. It took more than seven months for the Army to formally organize the unit and another five months of drilling and training at Fort Mason in San Francisco before they received orders for France (for more information, see Part One).

Once in France, the men and women from California discovered that, before they could begin treating the Army’s wounded soldiers, they would have to figure out how to transform several dilapidated hotels in a French resort town into a modern hospital (for more information, see Part Two). They managed to pull it off and just in time as the Allied effort to blunt the German’s offensive and the subsequent Allied counteroffensive kept the hospital and its staff busy from June 1918 through January 1919 (for more information on “the work” of the hospital, see Part Three).

This post will address the human elements of Base Hospital Thirty—their entertainments, celebrations, and the communal bonds that shaped the military unit into something akin to family—and what those things contribute to the veteran experience. Entertainment and leisure activities were rare for units like Base Hospital Thirty, but when such opportunities presented themselves, the personnel and patients were quick to take advantage of the chances to let down their guard in an otherwise rigid and stressful environment and form communities that went well beyond their professional affiliation.

Figure 22 - "Orchestra” from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 22 – “Orchestra” from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

One of the first entertainments the personnel of Base Hospital Thirty developed was the orchestra and bands. Likely in response to the delay in the Army bureaucracy, the orchestra organized at Fort Mason in San Francisco and continued playing together until the unit’s disbandment in 1919. Under the direction of Captain C. M. Richards, the orchestra featured enlisted personnel right alongside the officers—indeed, four of the five “first” violin spots were held by enlisted personnel, including two Privates First Class, then the second-lowest military rank. More remarkable, Lieutenant Colonel E. S. Kilgore, the commanding officer of the entire unit for the majority of its existence during the Great War, played in the “second” violin and was apparently one of the lowest ranking members of the orchestra by measure of musical talent, demonstrating an interesting reversal of the traditional military hierarchy that formed the basis of the unit in all other cases. The orchestra was a meritocracy of talent, and it did not play favors to even the most senior officers.

While the unit drilled and trained during the days at Fort Mason in preparation for their deployment to France, the orchestra’s twenty-five members gathered and practiced diligently at night, eventually providing frequent concerts for the entertainment of the rest of the unit. They continued holding impromptu concerts aboard the S.S. Northern Pacific on its record-breaking journey from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal, and it was especially appreciated at Royat, where patients, hospital personnel, and nearby military units and French civilians alike had many occasions to hear their music.

Not only did the orchestra provide entertainment to the audience—a crucial element in a stressful hospital environment—it provided opportunities for the unit to bond. It is remarkable, given how busy the personnel of Base Hospital Thirty were, that the orchestra as a whole was able to so often practice and play together, given that their musical pursuits would necessarily be secondary to their medical and official duties.

The hospital even boasted its own in-house jazz orchestra, whose members dedicated much of their downtime to entertaining the troops, French civilians, and neighboring units. Led by the musically-talented Private First Class Harold Turner—who played trombone and clarinet with the symphony orchestra, piano with the jazz orchestra, and served as the official bugler for the unit when he was not working in the clinic—the jazz quartet was always featured in the hospital’s entertainment programs.

Figure 23 - "The Base Thirty Vaudeville Aggregation at Les Sables d’Olonne" Program Announcement from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 23 – “The Base Thirty Vaudeville Aggregation at Les Sables d’Olonne” Program Announcement from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

But the orchestra was not the only entertainment. Grace Haviland, an American newspaper correspondent, happened to be in Royat during the Fourth of July celebrations. Lacking fireworks, hospital personnel and patients—most of whom were Marines fresh from the fighting at Belleau Woods—made up for it in a day and night full of “patriotism, entente cordials, fun and feasting.”

Most of the patients were convalescing and restricted to bed rest, recuperating from serious wounds including exposure to mustard gas in the ferocious fighting on the Western Front. But the local French civilians decided to do something for the Americans in the hospital as French schoolchildren brought bouquets of red, white, and blue flowers and a local chocolatier donated large amounts of their sweet desert to the troops free of charge. And to further raise spirits, the personnel of Base Hospital Thirty put together a three-hour long amateur vaudeville show featuring sketches of San Francisco, Egypt, and “Somewhere in France.”

A highlight of the program was the play “In My Harem,” put together by the pharmacist, Sergeant First Class Henry Creger—a man known to all in the unit to have a ready cure for anything from a “hold over” (hangover) to a corn. The play provided a rare opportunity in military entertainment in the form of the comic skit. Haviland described the scene:

The Hero was a cross between Otis Skinner’s Hadj, in his make-up, and the modern idea of a Pirate, and the sinuous dancing by the “not much dressed Egyptian mural decoration” effect of the Lady Turk was—words fail me—we must leave it with the costume to the imagination.

The well-known pharmacist sergeant played the hero, and the equally well-known private in charge of the commissary store, Tom Hill, dressed as a member of the hero’s harem—the Lady Turk—and danced for the crowd to great comedic effect. Their skit left an impression not only on Grace Haviland, but on the entire unit, as the Fourth of July show was well-covered in the unit’s memory book The Record. Dressing in drag for skits for the sake of laughs is, to modern observers, a long-standing tradition in military units, but it was something I was not expecting to find among the troops in the First World War. Unfortunately, no pictures of the event survived, so as Grace Haviland says, we must leave the scene to our imagination.

Figure 24 – “Base Hospital No. 30 rugby team” in Base Hospital #30 Collection, Calisphere.org

Members of the unit also engaged in sports, when time allowed, which was not often. They organized a football team to play rugby against a team of local French citizens and managed to play two exhibition games. The team was made up of former high school and university stars like Lieutenant Colonel Alanson Weeks—a former fullback for the undefeated 1898 Michigan Wolverines—in addition to “earnest beginners.” Down six points to none at the end of the first half, the men from California managed to rally in the second and pull off the victory by a score of eight to six, giving the hospital unit a measure of bragging rights for their time in France. But the most popular sport was baseball.

Members of the unit started playing baseball together beginning at Fort Mason, and in France they played many games against teams from neighboring units. They played, and usually won, many games against teams from the aviation and ordnance units stationed near Clermont, France, and even managed to secure a friendly game against Base Hospital No. 20, the unit from the University of Pennsylvania.

Base Thirty had the edge all the way through, and leading by a score of 3 to 2 in the ninth with two out, the umpire (a Base Twenty man and their coach) deeded the game to them by favoring his team with a couple of not-even-close decisions. Thus (as often the case in a prize fight), the best side won, but Twenty was given the decision.

Their crowning achievement was an exhibition game against the Vichy Hospital Center. With a one-score lead in the ninth, the men of Base Thirty ended the game on a double-play with the last out being made on an attempt to tie the score. The Vichy player slid into home plate, intentionally running into Bill King, Base Thirty’s catcher, in an attempt to get him to drop the ball. Bill held the ball firmly, ending the game, though he had to be admitted to the wards of Base Hospital No. 30 on account of having suffered a broken leg in the collision. Private King might have simply been remembered as a member of the Quartermaster Corps but for his heroics on the ballfield that day.

Figure 25 - "Verdun Battlefield" courtesy of Chemins de Mémoire, www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/revue/verdun-1916-2016

Figure 25 – “Verdun Battlefield” courtesy of Chemins de Mémoire, www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/revue/verdun-1916-2016

The announcement of the Armistice on November 11th was well received by all, but the patient load at the hospital at the time prevented any organized celebrations. Lieutenant Colonel Eugene S. Kilgore, the hospital commander, had received orders to a new duty station and had been busy showing Major Alanson Weeks around to make the necessary introductions to ease Weeks’s transition into command. Kilgore caught a train to Paris on the night of the 11th and found the city celebrating the peace in full measure on the 12th.

Everywhere there were informal processions—boys or soldiers with a drum or a bugle and some flags would march hither and thither, and crowds would fall in behind them. Then they would meet a group of soldiers, and the little procession would break up and join hands and dance around the group. Those in the center would throw up their hands and cry “Kamarad” or else would rush at the dancers and kiss the women. As I stared down the Av. Mont-Martre a crowd of girls seized both my arms and my coat-tails and dragged me into the stream. The girl on my left had an American buck private on the other arm and we were all mixed up with Poilus, Australians, Italians, etc. An American soldier kissed an American colonel on both cheeks with the remark, “You’re a colonel and I’m a buck private, but I don’t give a damn!”

The Armistice changed the Army’s plans almost overnight. The Army rescinded Kilgore’s orders and left him in limbo for a time, which he used to take in some sightseeing, including the now-quiet front. He recorded an adventure to Verdun—the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war—in early December 1918 in his diary:

I soon found a small truck going to Verdun…. We passed thru Verdun and across the Meuse, then… into “Death Valley” and past Dead Man’s Hill. These little villages were good example of large numbers over the battle fields of France that are completely destroyed—just piles of rubbish without anything to indicate where the houses stood…. [We left the truck and] here we began to explore trenches and dugouts not yet entered by the Clean Up Companies. Even the dead were not all buried. I saw one dead German, and others saw a number of corpses a little farther over in the wood. There were, oof course, all sorts of sourvenirs; and in a short time the chauffer and I, who were together, had picked up a couple of helmets, four German rifles, a lot of bayonettes, etc…. In gathering our trinkets we used due care to avoid touching wires or stumbling into any of the numerous traps [and] unexploded grenades and “potato-mashers” lying about.

Dr. Kilgore and his chauffer wandered much further into the battlefield than they had planned and soon found they could not find their way back to the car, so they continued until they found a poor road to follow through a series of shelled-out villages until they stumbled into a dugout still occupied by Allied troops. The Armistice ended the fighting, but the scars of the war were certainly still quite fresh, as Dr. Kilgore’s overnight venture through the Verdun battlefield demonstrated.

Likewise, work at the hospital in Royat continued just as it had before the armistice, though with an expectancy of going home again soon. Allowances were made to prepare for Thanksgiving and Christmas in a proper manner. This was made possible in large part thanks to a $5,000 donation (about $90,000 today) from banker William H. Crocker—a major financial backer of the UC School of Medicine—which was used to secure food, new musical instruments, and decorations for the holidays.

Figure 26 - Nurses' Masquerade at Hotel Richlieu, Royat from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 26 – Nurses’ Masquerade at Hotel Richlieu, Royat from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

By Christmas, the patient load was beginning to fall off as the Army focused on stabilizing patients for transfer to hospitals in the United States. The Red Cross, hospital personnel, and local officials and businesses worked together to create a full week’s program of festivities between December 24, 1918, and January 1, 1919, complete with a very attractive program published specifically for the occasion. They stuffed hundreds of stockings for the patients and personnel, exchanged gifts throughout the wards on Christmas Eve, held plays and concerts, presented movies at the Red Cross theater, and capped it all off with a New Year’s Eve Reception and Dance for the officers and nurses.

It was a happy time for most as they knew they were going home, but it was also a farewell for most. The hospital received orders to finish processing its remaining patients—it had about six-hundred in the wards on January 1, 1919, in a hospital with an operating capacity of twenty-four-hundred beds—and many of the personnel were being reassigned. By January 20, 1919, the hospital at Royat closed shop and the majority of the unit set out for the trip home.

Figure 27 – “Grunnagle, Parmelee, and Barshinger” (left) and “Creger Leaves Merritt” (right), from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 27 – “Grunnagle, Parmelee, and Barshinger” (left) and “Creger Leaves Merritt” (right), from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

A review of the “Enlisted Personnel” section of The Record, written by First Sergeant Alexander Rattray, the “top” or ranking enlisted man in the unit, provides a few sentences of insight into the family that formed at the hospital. First Sergeant Rattray wrote a paragraph for 159 enlisted men, excluding himself, who served with the hospital at some point—demonstrating a senior non-commissioned officer’s unique respect for his men. Not all of the paragraphs were flattering, and some of these paragraphs are longer than others, but they provide insight into the family that developed in Base Hospital Thirty. A few examples from Rattray’s notes are worthy of mention.

Sergeant First Class Henry P. Hauser, “Red” for short by his friends (meaning everybody in Royat). “Red” could tickle a typewriter (meaning, of course, a machine) with the best of them. He could also show a few tricks on the football field and could take his place on the stage when the occasion arose. As an all around man “Red” was there. Was last heard of leading a band of athletes around France. Their headquarters were probably Paris.

Red Hauser was a beloved rabble rouser in Base Hospital Thirty, pushing paper by day, he took part in every opportunity for entertainment. He apparently had a reputation for seeking passes to Paris to take in the sights and serves as an example of the adventurous type of veteran who took full advantage of the opportunities provided by his deployment.

Sergeant First Class Elmer McKnew, “Choate,” had charge of the laundry at Royat and had his hands full. He played shortstop on the ball team, that was, one game. Mac was always sure to produce a smile when you mentioned home, as he was waiting for the first sight of a young son.

Many soldiers, like Elmer McKnew left pregnant wives behind in San Francisco when they deployed to France. Soldiers like McKnew were a constant and poignant reminder of home and what the members of the hospital were missing out on in order to serve their nation. It was also a reminder that those serving in France were not the only ones affected by the war.

Figure 28 - "’Veteran’ Army Nurses Return from Europe” clipping of The San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, March 25, 1919, in AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Figure 28 – “’Veteran’ Army Nurses Return from Europe” clipping of The San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, March 25, 1919, in AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Back home, in San Francisco, the officers’ wives formed the Women’s Auxiliary for Base Hospital No. 30 to support the unit and each other during the deployment of their loved ones. They raised money for the purchase of instruments used by the orchestra, for athletic equipment used by the baseball and football teams, and to augment the purchase of food and gifts for the holiday celebrations.  Their story is relatively limited in The Record, covering only three paragraphs, but it details the account of their effort to welcome the nurses back to San Francisco in March 1919, and to hold a special dance and reception for the main part of the unit at the Palace Hotel on May 15, 1919.

Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle on March 25, 1919 may have seen the article “‘Veteran’ Army Nurses Return from Europe” covering the reception the nurses received at the Oakland Ferry Canteen, provided that they read through to page ten. Perhaps many of those readers would have viewed it as a colorful little article about the pluck of local nurses, or as an addendum to the patriotic trappings hung on the veterans of the war. But the whole story, as this blog series has hopefully shown, goes much deeper than that.

On Veterans Day we celebrate our nation’s veterans with pomp and circumstance very similar to that displayed in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. We wave flags, hold parades, and decorate in themes of red, white, and blue. But for many veterans, the day has deeper meaning. It is a reminder of the men and women with whom we had the pleasure (or displeasure) and the privilege to serve and of the communities for which we served—both the ones we left behind and the ones we formed in the military.

Within a year of returning from France, the men and women of Base Hospital Thirty put together and published a memory book they called The Record. In it, they told their story to each other and to anyone interested in flipping through its pages. They also listed the addresses of anyone interested in staying in touch—an indication that they wanted to continue to keep tabs on the members of their military family.

Attached to the copy of The Record stored in UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections is a letter from Dr. Eugene S. Kilgore to Dr. Howard Fleming, dated September 16, 1919. In it, Dr. Kilgore expresses how many of the unit had written him expressing interest in getting everyone together again for another evening of entertainment and reflection, “possibly on Armistice Day Nov. 11.”

So, on this centennial anniversary of the armistice, let us reflect upon and remember the remarkable men and women of Base Hospital Thirty and the surrogate family they formed. Their service and stories are, in many ways, precursors to our own stories, making us extended members of their family. Their story provides examples of service to others, of overcoming difficulties, and of working together towards the best possible outcome. It is a story that is rooted in the traditions of the hospital and healing professions as it is in the military. It is a story of selfless service. And that’s appropriate, for isn’t that what Veteran’s Day is really all about?

Acknowledgements

I want to offer my sincerest appreciation to the staff at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections—first for not only allowing but encouraging me to explore their collected materials on Base Hospital No. 30, but also for being so incredibly helpful and foundational to this project. Archivists Polina Ilieva, Kelsi Evans, and David Krah all deserve recognition for their contributions and I am extremely grateful for their guidance, assistance, and suggestions throughout the process. I would also be remiss if I did not express my appreciation to the Medical Heritage Library for agreeing to expose these posts to their audience as well.

If you are interested in learning more about Base Hospital No. 30, I highly encourage you to visit the UCSF Archives and Special Collections and ask to see the Base Hospital Thirty collection (AR 2017-16), the Homer Woolsey Papers (MSS 70-5), the Howard Naffziger papers (MSS 97-04), and anything else that the helpful archivists suggest based upon your interests.

UCSF Archives Halloween Open House: Oddities of the Past

Get in the Halloween spirit and join UCSF Archives and Special Collections on Wednesday October 31st and view selected pieces from the historical collections in the UCSF Library 5th Floor Reading Room. You will see “medical oddities” of the past including surgical kits, bloodletting tools and more!

12:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Also make sure to drop by the Makers Lab Haunted House anytime from 10am-6pm.

 

Halloween Open House 2017

Halloween Open House 2017

 

Internship Opportunities

UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections has 2 new internship opportunities.

Archives Intern for AIDS History

The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic: Digitizing, Reuniting and Providing Universal Access to Historical AIDS Records.

The Archives Intern for AIDS History will be assigned various tasks to assist in completion of the project including performing Quality Control checks on digitized papers, digital objects and metadata. Candidate should be a student or recent graduate from a library or information science program, preferably with a concentration or interest in archives and special collections. Students of public history, and history of health sciences are also encouraged to apply. This is a part time temporary appointment.
Department: Archives and Special Collections
Rank and Salary: Library Intern – $15/hr
Term: 150 hours Fall 2018 – Spring 2019

Project Description

The Archives and Special Collections department of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Library, in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society, has been awarded a $315,000 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The collaborating institutions will digitize about 127,000 pages from 49 archival collections related to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area and make them widely accessible to the public online. In the process, collections whose components had been placed in different archives for various reasons will be digitally reunited, facilitating access for researchers outside the Bay Area.
 The 127,000 pages from the three archives range from handwritten correspondence and notebooks to typed reports and agency records to printed magazines. Also included are photographic prints, negatives, transparencies, and posters. The materials will be digitized by the University of California, Merced Library’s Digital Assets Unit, which has established a reputation for digitizing information resources so that they can be made available to the world via the web. All items selected for digitization will be carefully examined to address any privacy concerns. The digital files generated by this project will be disseminated broadly through the California Digital Library, with the objects freely accessible to the public through both Calisphere, operated by the University of California, and the Digital Public Library of America, which will have an AIDS history primary sources set.

Skills and experience desired:

  • Strong candidates will be detail oriented and possess excellent organizational skills
  • Proficiency  with MS Excel and Google spreadsheets
  • Proficiency with document sharing and cloud computing services (Google drive, Box)
  • Experience with digital asset management systems
  • Ability to work independently
  • Ability to lift boxes weighing up to 40 pounds.

Hours and Location:

The timing of the internship is flexible, but should be carried out during the Fall of 2018 and ending early Spring 2019,  based on applicant and institutional commitments.  Up to two 8-hour days per week for 10-12 weeks. Work will be performed onsite at the library, though offsite work is possible.

Stipend:

A stipend of $15/hour is available for the internship. 

To Apply:

Applications for the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Internship, including a cover letter, resume, and names/contact info of two references should be sent to 
David Krah, Project Archivist 
UCSF Archives and Special Collections
University of California, San Francisco
530 Parnassus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840
Apply for this position

Digital Processing and Implementation Intern

The Digital Processing and Implementation Intern will assist the UCSF Digital Archivist with various aspects of the Digital Archives program as they are implemented and brought online for the first time. Potential projects include:

  • Testing digital forensics and processing hardware and software being implemented in the digital forensics lab.
  • Compiling inventory of physical archival collections containing digital media, and pulling collections and identifying, counting, and cataloging digital media present.
  • Disk-imaging digital media removed from collections and transferring data to library storage systems.
  • Creating metadata about digital media being processed in digital forensics lab, editing metadata for various digitization or cataloging projects.
  • Operating scanning equipment to digitize archival collections for patron and researcher use.
  • Processing digital collections under the supervision of the Digital Archivist, including finding aid and container list creation and manipulation of access copies of born-digital content to create access-ready versions of collection.
  • Researching computer tools and systems for management and preservation of digital objects, and compiling and reporting on capabilities, requirements, dependencies, etc. of these utilities.
  • Participate in staff meetings, assist with writing blog posts, and help with reference/duplication requests.
Department: Archives and Special Collections
Rank and Salary: Library Intern – $15/hr
Term: 150 – 200 hours Fall 2018 – Spring 2019

Location

UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management,
530 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94143-0840

Work Type

Archival Processing, Information Technology, Computer Science

Work To Be Done

On site, with occasional opportunities to work from home or other location

Desired Qualifications

  • Experience with ArchivesSpace, Nuxeo or other archival collections management software
  • Experience with or interest in digital preservation, digital file formats and media, computer science, or history of computing technologies
  • Experience with or interest in digital forensics in archival collections and various digital forensics tools, such as FTK Imager and BitCurator
  • Familiarity with scripting, computer programming in any language, Unix.
  • Excellent analytical and writing skills
  • High level of accuracy and attention to detail
  • Ability to work independently
  • Ability to lift boxes weighing up to 40 pounds

Stipend

A stipend of $15/hour is available for the internship. The internship is intended for those who are currently enrolled in an undergraduate/graduate program.

Hours

Up to two 8-hour days per week for 10-12 weeks. Specific on-site hours are negotiable, but must be completed between 8:00 a.m.  and 5:00 pm Monday through Friday. Start and end dates are flexible.

Application Process

Please submit a letter of interest, a current resume and contact information for two professional references to:

Charles Macquarie
Digital Archivist
UCSF Archives and Special Collections
University of California, San Francisco
530 Parnassus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840

Apply for this position

The UCSF Library is committed to a culture of inclusion and respect. We embrace diversity of thought, experience, and people as a source of strength which is critical to our success. We encourage candidates to apply who thrive in an environment which celebrates and serves our diverse communities.

Equal Employment Opportunity
The University of California San Francisco is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information.

About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It is the only campus in the 10-campus UC system dedicated exclusively to the health sciences.

About UCSF Archives and Special Collections
UCSF Archives & Special Collections is a dynamic health sciences research center that contributes to innovative scholarship, actively engages users through educational activities, preserves past knowledge, enables collaborative research experiences to address contemporary challenges, and translates scientific research into patient care.

Archives Month

October is American Archives Month, and UCSF Archives and Special Collections is celebrating with a number of events in the coming weeks to showcase our work as custodians of Health Sciences and UCSF History.

Wed October 3: #AskanArchivist Day

Join us and countless other repositories and Archival Institutions on Twitter using the hashtag #Askanarchivist

Pose your burning questions and curiosities about our collections, services and archives work in general.

Follow us on Twitter @ucsf_archives

 

Wed October 10:

ARCHIVES TALK: Medicine as Mission: Black Women Physicians’ Careers, 1864-1941

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections as we explore the little-known history of African American women physicians’ careers in medicine from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Through an extensive survey of the careers of all known African American women who practiced medicine in this period, a complicated portrait of both accomplishment and constraint emerges. This talk demonstrates that black women physicians succeeded in carrying out their demanding “missions” of attempting to address what we currently term “health disparities” in African American communities. Simultaneously, however, professionalized, scientific medicine in the twentieth century increasingly limited career opportunities available to black women physicians.

Speakers

Meg Vigil-Fowler, PhD is a historian of medicine who studies the intersecting histories of race, gender, and professionalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She received her PhD from UCSF’s Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine earlier this year and is currently writing a book on the earliest African American women physicians.

Renee Navarro, MD, PharmD is the Vice Chancellor of Diversity and Outreach, charged with creating and maintaining a diverse university environment where everyone has an opportunity to excel. In her new role, Navarro will collaborate with faculty, staff and students to develop and carry out a strategic plan for diversity and inclusion at the campus – and in recruitment and retention of faculty, students, trainees and staff.

Aimee Medeiros, PhD is an Assistant Professor, History of Health Sciences at UCSF. Medeiros’s work focuses on the reciprocity between diagnoses, preventive care measures, and societal expectations of the body in medicine. Medeiros’s current projects include, Too Young to Die: The History of the Children’s Hospital in the U.S. and Health Sciences Data Laboratory (HSDL), which will complement Big Data efforts by generating historical medical data preserved from non-digital formats.

 

Saturday October 13: SF Archives Crawl

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections, California Historical Society, San Francisco History Center, Society of California Pioneers, and Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University for San Francisco’s second Archives Crawl. The theme for the Archives Crawl is Immigration and Migration to California and we are celebrating in October, which is Archives Month!

Archives Crawl is designed to celebrate archives in the city and encourages guests to explore and engage with institutions that collect archival material. Visit institutions you may not have visited before, pose questions, learn more about what an archive is and what archivists do.

Find the UCSF Archives & Special Collections team at the SFPL Main Branch Library1pm – 5pm

More details visit the San Francisco Archives Crawl site.

 

Wed October 31

UCSF Archives Halloween Open House: Oddities of the Past

Get in the Halloween spirit and join UCSF Archives and Special Collections on October 31st and view selected pieces from the historical collections in the UCSF Library 5th Floor Reading Room. You will see “medical oddities” of the past including surgical kits, bloodletting tools and more!

Also make sure to drop by the Makers Lab Haunted House anytime from 10am-6pm.

 

Ongoing exhibit: Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry

 

 

 

 

 

Pairing Art with Artifact: The Development of Open Wide

This is a guest post by exhibit curator Sabrina Oliveros

Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art, which formally opens on September 27 with a reception at the UCSF Library, features a wealth of artworks that depict how perspectives on dentistry, and dentistry itself, have changed over the centuries. The pieces range from satires and caricatures to religious prints and anatomical plates, and they come from artists as different and distinguished as George Cruikshank, Honoré-Victorin Daumier, Francisco de Goya, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Marc Chagall.

Remarkable as the art may be, they only comprise half the treasures – and tell part of the stories – in Open Wide.

For this exhibit to find its form, it needed to pair art with artifacts.

Which artifacts could go on display with which artworks? Early project research meant to answer this question.

Which artifacts could go on display with which artworks? Early project research meant to answer this question.

Gateways to learning

Many of the prints in Open Wide had been exhibited from 2003 to 2004 in a show of the same name at the University at Buffalo. When UCSF loaned the artworks from their owner, Dr. Morton G. Rivo, the goal was to expand on the original show using items from Archives & Special Collections. If an artwork illustrated a specific moment in the history of dentistry, the artifacts could elaborate on that moment, helping contextualize what the art showed and turn it into a touchpoint for learning more about the profession.

With some pieces, this task was rather straightforward. The etching Der Zahnzieher (c. 1631-35) by Jan Joris van Vliet (c. 1610 – after 1635), for example, shows a tooth-puller at work; on the wall behind him is a bleeding bowl. Bleeding bowls – which were used to catch drops of a patient’s blood during bloodletting procedures – are among the many historical objects in UCSF’s collections.

Displaying a bowl beside Der Zahnzieher not only added three-dimensionality to the print. It opened an opportunity to discuss why the bowl is in the image and what a tooth-puller used it for (bloodletting was once believed to relieve toothaches). Its presence in the print also suggests that the tooth-puller might have been a barber-surgeon, the kind of tradesman who would have certainly owned such a tool. What is a barber-surgeon and why is this distinction significant in dental practice? Questions and answers can go and on – indicating just how a single artifact can become a gateway into the history of dentistry.

Juxtapositions

The breadth of UCSF’s collections also allowed for other kinds of juxtaposition.

Take one case on the library’s third floor, which contains the print Easing the Toothach (sic). Created long before anything we now use as anesthesia, the image shows a patient who is in such pain that he pulls off his dentist’s wig during treatment. Antique vials of Novocain and an ether gas mask – forerunners of modern local anesthesia – surround the print. In contrast to the bleeding bowl display, the artifacts here expound on the development of dental practice by showing what is absent from the art, not what is visible in it.

Easing the Toothach (sic), by a follower of James Gillray (1757-1815), is the centerpiece of a display on pain management artifacts.

Easing the Toothach (sic), by a follower of James Gillray (1757-1815), is the centerpiece of a display on pain management artifacts.

Another piece on the third floor, the hand-colored engraving Tugging at Eye (High) Tooth (1821), helps showcase a different facet of UCSF’s collections.

 The colorful scene, set in a well-decorated dentist’s office, is by George Cruikshank (1792-1878), one of the most prolific artists during Britain’s golden age of caricature and satire. It shows a dentist furiously at work on a hapless patient, surrounded by his books, dentures, and instruments like teeth-scrapers, a mirror, and a mallet. This piece could have been displayed with similar tools in UCSF’s vaults, again lending three-dimensionality to the office Cruikshank depicts. But there was more to be mined from the print.

Cruikshank lined the dentist’s shelves with titles like Miseries of Human Life, Tales of Terror, and Frankenstein – a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of what the distressed patient is going through. Funny as these were, they raised a few questions: what kinds of books would (or should) have been on a professional dentist’s shelves? And which books shaped the practice so patients would become more comfortable in the chair?

Following this line of thought, the case thus features rare books from the 18th and 19th centuries that advanced knowledge about dentistry. They include the first modern textbook on oral surgery, the first work on orthodontics, and the book that introduced terms like molars and cuspids.

The final third-floor display entitled “The Dentist’s Bookshelf.”

The final third-floor display entitled “The Dentist’s Bookshelf.”

An appropriate addition

Beyond artifacts and rare books, Open Wide also exhibits selections from UCSF’s Japanese woodblock print and School of Dentistry photograph collections. Yet in a university library’s show about dental art and history, perhaps some of the most meaningful materials from the Archives are yearbooks from the school’s early decades.

The Chaff yearbooks displayed on the fifth floor were published from 1897 to 1909 by the junior class of the UC College of Dentistry. They include some truly eye-catching art: one illustration depicts a procedure as an intense sporting match, complete with a referee, spectators, and blow-by-blow commentary; another shows two patients atop a trophy or pedestal, looking like they barely survived a fight. (Its caption? “Patience on a Monument.”)

Such images proved interesting – and unthinkable not to put on exhibit – because they offer historical records of how dental students themselves viewed their profession. More than that, their perspectives surprisingly echo the wry and comical tone of many artworks loaned for Open Wide.

As far as pairing art and artifacts go, there couldn’t have been a more appropriate match than that.

"It is indeed a funny world, But hard truth mingles with the Chaff. It takes some study ere a man May know exactly when to laugh".

A verse from the 1900 volume of Chaff helps explain the spirit behind some yearbook art.

 

 

 

Open Wide Exhibit Opening Reception and Self-Guided Tours

What do a famous French dentist, Snow White, and a Victorian gentleman with a pesky toothache have in common? They are a few of the harassed, horrified, and often hilarious figures you can find in the exhibit Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art.

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 27th, 12noon – 1pm, UCSF Library

REGISTER HERE

Join the UCSF Archives and Special Collections for the opening reception and self-guided tours exploring artworks from the collection of Dr. Morton G. Rivo, D.D.S., a former Chief of Periodontics at the UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion. These selections were first displayed in a 2003 exhibit of the same name at the University of Buffalo. UCSF’s iteration of Open Wide adapts materials from this earlier show and augments the artworks with artifacts, rare books, and UCSF School of Dentistry records from UCSF Archives. Together, they offer a glimpse into how perspectives on dentistry – and dentistry itself – have changed over the years. 

Open Wide will be on display on three floors (first, third, and fifth) of the UCSF Library at Parnassus through August 2019.

12pm Opening Remarks by Dr. Morton G. Rivo, D.D.S., former Chief of Periodontics at the UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion; Sabrina Oliveros, exhibit curator; and Sara Hughes, MA, EdD. Associate Dean of Education & Student Affairs, School of Dentistry

The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic: 1 year update on the National Endowment for the Humanities Implementation Grant

Archives and Special Collections has just submitted its annual report to the National Endowment for the Humanities on the collaborative mass digitization grant The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic. 

At the one year point of The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic, the consortium of UCSF Library Archives & Special Collections, San Francisco Public Library History Center/Hormel LGBTQIA Center, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, and UC Merced have made significant headway towards our goal of digitizing and publishing 127,000 pages from our various AIDS History collections.

To date we have published seven complete collections on Calisphere, and we have scanned and published the poster component of UCSF’s AIDS History Project Ephemera collection. Thirteen other collections have nearly completed the digitization process and are undergoing quality control checks before being harvested into Calisphere.

The Ultimate Point: Shooting Up and Sharing Needles Puts You at Risk for AIDS. This Fact May Save Your Life!

The Ultimate Point (SF AIDS Foundation). AIDS History Project Ephemera Collection, MSS 2000-31

40,518 pages of materials have to date been uploaded to the Nuxeo Digital Asset Management System we use for managing and publishing to Calisphere.  Some of these have gone to active publication, some are still undergoing quality assurance (QA) procedures. An additional 35,061 pages have been scanned, but have yet to be ingested into the DAMS.

We have also given talks at four library and archives conferences in the past year to share details about our project.

In the coming year we will continue digitizing and publishing collection materials to Calisphere.org and begin planning online exhibits for Calisphere and Digital Public Library of America that will serve to unite and interpret the collections across our partnering institutions.

AIDS Legal Referral Panel's AIDSLaw Conference. Friday November 11, 1988.

AIDSLaw Conference 1988. AIDS Legal Referral Panel Records, 2000-46, Box 2, Folder 8 (GLBTHS)

Digitized collections currently online:

  1. ACT-UP Golden Gate Records, 1988-1993, MSS 98-47 https://calisphere.org/collections/308/ 
  2. Barbara Cameron Papers, 1968-2003 (SFPL GLC 63) https://calisphere.org/collections/27002/
  3. Shanti Project Records, 1982-1994, MSS 98-48 https://calisphere.org/collections/19989/
  4. AIDS Legal Referral Panel (ALRP) records, 1984-2000, (#2000-46) GLBT HS  https://calisphere.org/collections/469/
  5. Bobbi Campbell Diary, 1983-1984, MSS 96-33 https://calisphere.org/collections/3684/
  6. Mobilization Against AIDS Records, 1984-1995,
    MSS 95-03 https://calisphere.org/collections/14922/
  7. People vs. Owen Bathhouse Closure Litigation, 1984-1987
    (SFPL SFH 31) https://calisphere.org/collections/26990/
  8. AIDS History Project — Ephemera Collection, 1981-2002, MSS 2000-31 (posters) https://calisphere.org/collections/466/

National Endowment for the Humanities

The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

 

Corresponding with Ralph H. Kellogg: A Record of Natural Beauty, Values, and Preservation

This is a guest post by Lynda Letona, Archives Assistant, regarding her project to process additions to the Ralph H. Kellogg papers.

 

This is the second and final blog on the Ralph H. Kellogg papers, the first of which appeared here: https://blogs.library.ucsf.edu/broughttolight/2018/02/27/ralph-h-kellogg-a-man-of-service/

Dr. Ralph H. Kellogg’s correspondence (1947-2007) features timely letters appealing to lawmakers on the need to preserve national parks in addition to editorial feedback and advice given to well-regarded physiologists who wrote important works on mountain journeys and high-altitude sickness. Below is a letter (dated May 25, 1954) addressed to Congressman John J. Allen, Jr. on the need to preserve national parks. This letter speaks in opposition to building a dam that would flood parts of Dinosaur National Monument, endangering the natural beauty, and value “to the country as a whole” reminding the reader that we can only preserve such natural treasures, “we cannot make them.” Dr. Kellogg refers to the construction of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, an important moment in environmental history to avoid repeating.

[Letter from Ralph H. Kellogg to Congressman John J. Allen on the need to preserve Dinosaur National Monument, 1954-05-25, MSS 90-38, carton 22, folder 2]

[Letter from Ralph H. Kellogg to Congressman John J. Allen on the need to preserve Dinosaur National Monument, 1954-05-25, MSS 90-38, carton 22, folder 2]

In his correspondence with colleagues such as Dr. John Burnard West, professor of physiology at the University of California, San Diego, and researcher in high-altitude medicine and adaptation, we come upon inspiring writings on the beauty of mountain exploration which serves as the impetus for the climber’s quest and the consequent need for research on respiration and high altitude physiology–a long-time shared research interest for Dr. Kellogg as well:

[Excerpt from “Mountain Journeys” by John B. West, quote by Reinhold Messner, the first climber to reach the summit of Mt. Everest without using supplemental oxygen, MSS 90-38, carton 24, folder 19]

[Excerpt from “Mountain Journeys” by John B. West, quote by Reinhold Messner, the first climber to reach the summit of Mt. Everest without using supplemental oxygen, MSS 90-38, carton 24, folder 19]

The history of altitude sickness is well preserved in Dr. Kellogg’s Correspondence Series and in his published works in the Research Series. The Daniel A. Gilbert file, where he exchanged correspondence with Dr. Gilbert, professor of physiology and a past Bowditch Lecturer of the American Physiological Society for outstanding scientist younger than 42, contains a paper titled “The First Documented Description of Mountain Sickness: The Andean or Pariacaca Story.” In this paper authored by Dr. Gilbert, we have another important document where the author credits Dr. Kellogg for his valuable advice. The folder also contains photographs of Pariacaca, the highest mountain in the Pariacaca mountain range in the Andes of Peru.

[Air view showing the west side of Pariacaca, 1990, MSS 90-38, carton 24, Folder 10]

[Air view showing the west side of Pariacaca, 1990, MSS 90-38, carton 24, Folder 10]

[Pariacaca, MSS 90-38, carton 24, Folder 10]

[Pariacaca, MSS 90-38, carton 24, Folder 10]

References and further reading:

(2000, October 18). Daniel L. Gilbert. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2000/10/18/daniel-l-gilbert-dies/485b9bf0-1f18-4cdd-8f9f-9235e8e844b6/?utm_term=.7a1804e86d45

(2014). History of the Valley. Restore Hetch Hetchy. Retrieved from https://www.hetchhetchy.org/history_of_the_valley

(n.d.). Echo Park Dam Controversy. Colorado Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/echo-park-dam-controversy

OAC. (n.d.). West (John B.) Papers. Retrieved from https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt4q2nd2g2/

UCSF Archives & Special Collections awarded $99,325 LSTA grant for textual data extraction from historical materials on AIDS/HIV

The Archives and Special Collections department of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Library has been awarded a $99,325 “Pitch-An-Idea, Local” grant for the first year of a two-year project from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Library Services and Technology Act funding administered through the California State Library. The Archives will take the nearly 200,000 pages of textual AIDS/HIV historical materials which have been digitized as part of various digitization projects — including the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)-funded project­, “Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis;” and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded project, “The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic” — and will extract unstructured, textual data from these materials using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and related software. The project team will prepare the text as a research-ready, unstructured textual dataset to be used for digital humanities, computationally driven cultural heritage, and machine learning research inquiries into the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The 24-month project, entitled “No More Silence — Opening the Data of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic” has commenced as of July 1, 2018. The digitized materials from which text will be extracted include handwritten correspondence, notebooks, typed reports, and agency records which represent a broad view of the lived experience of the epidemic, including documentation from People with AIDS and their friends, families, and scientists and public health officials working to slow the epidemic. All historical materials represented in this dataset have been previously screened to address privacy concerns. The resulting unstructured, textual dataset will be deposited in the UC Dash datasharing repository for public access and use by any interested parties, and will also be deposited in other similar data repositories as appropriate. “During my tenure at UCSF,” says health sciences historian and professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at UCSF, Dr. Aimee Medeiros, “I have been inspired by the library’s enthusiasm and dedication to public access and the use of practices in the digital humanities to help maximize access to HIV/AIDS material.” This project will build on that legacy by bringing these valuable historical materials into the realm of digital humanities and scientific research and making them computationally actionable.

According to Dr. Paul Volberding, director of the AIDS Research Institute at UCSF, “Discovering the complexities of the virus and developing effective treatments will be studied of course, but the lives of those directly involved as patients as well as care providers is equally significant. The cultural aspects of the epidemic will most directly benefit from the work [of this project]. Combining the growing field of computational science with the already large and rapidly growing archive of materials from all aspects of the AIDS epidemic demand the creation of new tools and I look forward to the new insights we gain from their application. [UCSF Library has] been sharply focused on the AIDS archives and have amassed a rich collection that, in its digitized form, will be the database for [these] new efforts. Together, this database and new computational tools, will enable a sophisticated analysis that I am convinced will be used to shed more insight in our understanding of the impact of the epidemic and ways our response will have meaning in the inevitable future crises.”

Once the preparation of the textual dataset is completed, the project team — consisting of archivists and technical staff from both the Archives and the Library — will embark on several pilot research projects using machine learning, and especially natural language processing research methods, on the data. The pilot projects, which will be scoped in collaboration with various stakeholders, will attempt to explore what kinds of structured data can be pulled out of the unstructured text, and define some simple critical inquiries which can be understood using this data, these methods, and the results of these experimental endeavors. Additionally the project team hopes to get a better sense of the functional requirements for systems supplying this type of data when tailored towards these kinds of medical humanities research questions. Through these efforts the project team will be able to better define the extent to which, as stated by Dr. Medeiros, “making 200,000 pages of primary-source archival documentation converted to unstructured textual data will… further meaningful research and our understanding of this epidemic.”

Finally, the project team will promote the existence of this dataset, and will lead workshops to help instruct potentially interested students, researchers, scholars, and members of the general public in its use. Again in the words of Dr. Medeiros, “the plans to provide workshops to help curious scholars learn how to best interface with this data is exciting as it will allow for those who are experts in the field but not necessarily in the digital medical humanities to conduct important research.”

This project will support innovation, creativity, and collaboration in and across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) by opening up a new body of historical materials for research and discovery. The project will foster new creative research methods in the areas of the humanities, which are just beginning to experiment with computationally-driven research, and it will encourage collaboration through the use of the newly-created data resource, engaging the expertise of both humanists and scientists in making discoveries in the data. Not only does this collaborative work allow for innovation “at the edges” of each of these fields, it allows for computational access to a previously-inaccessible research object — the data of the lived experience and cultural history of the AIDS crisis in the Bay Area and beyond.

The following institutions and groups are serving as informal partners on this project:

About UCSF Archives & Special Collections (UCSF Library)
The mission of the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is to identify, collect, organize, interpret, and maintain rare and unique material to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve institutional memory. The UCSF AIDS History Project (AHP) began in 1987 as a joint effort of historians, archivists, AIDS activists, health care providers, scientists, and others to secure historically significant resources documenting the response to the AIDS crisis, its holdings currently include 46 collections and they continue to grow.
www.library.ucsf.edu

UCSF Library logo

About the Library Services and Technology Act
Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grants are federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that are awarded by the State Library to eligible California libraries. This project was supported in whole or in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. www.library.ca.gov/grants/library-services-technology-act/

California State Library logo
Institute of Museum and Library Services logo

 

Intern Report: Crafting a Digital Forensics Lab

This is a guest post by our Digital Archives intern for summer 2018. The intern worked on implementing, testing, and piloting equipment for the Digital Forensics Lab to capture content off of decaying computer media which are present in our collections. 

This summer I worked with UCSF’s Digital Archivist Charles Macquarie on building up the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Digital Forensics Lab. It was such an honor to come and join the UCSF team because of the great people, and the unique and important collections that the Archives preserves and provides access to. I am grateful for the experience and the shared wisdom of the staff, and to be able to contribute to this growing piece of the work of the Archives.

What exactly does it mean to build a Digital Forensics Lab? In the case of UCSF, many of the collections contain obsolete and legacy media – things like floppy disks and ZIP disks, and even personal digital assistants (PDAs, remember those pre-smart phone devices?) and SD cards. As more time passes, it isn’t so easy to read or utilize these formats effectively without access to the machines and software that are used to read and create them.

Without access, we risk losing important parts of collections when outdated digital document formats and research materials become no-longer readable. By creating a lab environment where we can rescue these items, we can give them life again. This is why I love this kind of work.

Building a lab like this is no small challenge! I’ve worked on configuring new software to power old hardware, testing lab equipment with “dummy disks” and files, troubleshooting the problems that arise with new implementation, and even building a new housing for a few select drives using the 3d-printing equipment in the UCSF Makers Lab. It has been a busy summer.

Throughout my time here I was able to contribute documentation, workflows, and hardware (my favorite part) to the lab implementation process, and to create software troubleshooting steps that should make it easier for archivists and researchers to use the lab equipment to retrieve difficult-to-read media and file formats from our archival collections.

I also appreciate being able to learn more about archival processing for digital collections in the context of digital forensics and born-digital archival materials. I gained practical field experience with both digital forensic work and digital curation that I can take back with me in the final year of my Master’s degree. Though I’m sad to be leaving the UCSF Library, I am grateful for the experience I’ve gained working on this challenging project, and I hope to return to visit next year.