Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our new Research and Technical Services Managing Archivist, Peggy Tran-Le. Peggy comes to UCSF with over 15 years of diverse experience as an archivist, most recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where she has served as the museum’s Archivist and Records Manager.
Peggy Tran-Le
During her tenure at SFMOMA, Peggy developed and managed the archives programs including planning, policies and procedures, acquisition, description, and processing and preservation of analog and digital institutional records and special collections. She established the museum’s records management program and advanced museum-wide policies and procedures through developing collaborative relationships and serving as a resource for museum staff regarding SFMOMA’s policies and procedures.
She oversaw research services provided to staff and external researchers, in addition to responding to reference inquiries, assisting researchers on site and remotely, and issuing permissions to publish for archival collections.
Prior to joining SFMOMA, Peggy spent time as an Archivist at the National Archives at San Francisco (NARA) and as the Research Archivist at Pixar Animation Studio. At NARA, she managed the volunteer and intern programs and established priorities for arrangement, description, and preservation of records. While at Pixar, she supported the international tour of PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation and the research for The Art of … series of Pixar art books.
She received a Master of Library and Information Science degree (MLIS) from San Jose State University, a Master of Arts (MA) in Art History from the University of Chicago, and Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Art History and US History from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The latest round of the Black Caucus Re-description project has been completed and uploaded to Calisphere, with the Black Caucus records now fully reflecting the more than 400 items with updated descriptions and metadata through the fabulous work of Elba Clemente-Lambert — founding member of the UCSF Black Caucus.
First UCSF Black Caucus Gala Committee members; Left to right: Ethel Adams, Karen Newhouse, Avis Ransburg, Elba Clemente-Lambert, Diana Farley-Frierson, Darlene Carter Collins, Claudette “CJ” Johnson
Clemente-Lambert undertook the project to update photo descriptions over the course of 2020 and early 2021, working in batches. Many of the photos in question were photos she herself had taken. Clemente-Lambert reached out to her networks — contacting some of the many folks she had worked with over her years at UCSF, even talking with people as far away as Texas. She also reached deep into her own memory — sharing that she could, surprisingly to her, actually remember the names of many folks in photos. “Sometimes,” she said, “it would take me a day or two, but then all of a sudden I would just say the name.” Additionally, Clemente-Lambert has her own collection of Black Caucus event fliers which she was able to turn to to help remember attendees and speakers at events. She recounted that “It got chaotic!”, but after getting her procedures down she was able to record an immense amount of metadata to enrich the description of the Black Caucus records.
Former UCSF custodians gave Clemente-Lambert some of the most helpful information, especially James Aaron and Ernie Badger — nicknamed “Radio” because “he talked so much and knew everything about everybody”. They recounted how the early group would gather at “Soul Row” — a set of benches in the entryway to Medical Sciences building. As Clemente-Lambert shared, “that was a meeting place, a sacred place for us, even though it was out in the open.” The group also used to have bake sales right by the elevator to the cafeteria, knowing that they would get the most sales from hungry cafeteria-goers.
Clemente-Lambert also noted significant assistance from others as well. Amy Levine of Women’s Resource center had worked closely with the Black Caucus on events, which they would always co-sponsor. Claudette Johnson, who had worked in the Chancellor’s Office, knew a lot of the people in photographs as well. Kathy Ballistari, who worked in hospital administration, knew a lot of people from the hospital and clinics, and also had a lot of “the names just came to me” moments. Linda Glasscock, Clemente-Lambert’s old manager in Labor Relations, also had a lot of helpful information.
The full-list of people who helped Clemente-Lambert with this project is as follows: James Aaron, Ethel Adams, Michael Adams, Ernie “Radio” Badger, Kathy Ballistari, Freeman Bradley, Anita Burton, Ira Butler, Sandy Canchola, Dorla Cantu, Charles Clary, Patricia Coleman, Susan Descalso, Diana Farley Frierson, Linda Glasscock, Corrine “Corky” Guttierez, Stan Hicks, Claudette Johnson, David Johnson, Kerry Johnson, Amy Levine, Fred Logan, Crystal Morris, Karen Newhouse, Sandra Norberg, Maryanne Penta, Drew Pitts, Paul Porter, Bob Rojas, Laurie Rojas, Eugene Salazar, Renee Saulter, Adrianne Sooy, Bill Stevens, Eric Vermillion, John Watson, Nancy Wright, Carol Yates
And finally, a big thank you to Jazmin Dew, the Archives staff-member who did much of the work to facilitate this project.
To explore more materials from the UCSF Black Caucus Records, check out the collection on Calisphere and the Online Archive of California (OAC)
This workshop is supported by California Revealed and administered in California by the State Librarian. The program is made possible by funding from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act.
This is a guest post by Rhea Misra, PhD Candidate, UCSF Biomedical Sciences (BMS) Program
In reading “The Black Politics of Eugenics,” I learned about how eugenics was not initially a negative concept. Eugenics relates to the idea of human improvement through reproduction and understanding hereditary. It has been associated with Nazi doctrine; however, Nuriddin brings up in the article that, at one point, eugenics was embraced by marginalized communities to combat scientific racism and improve racial equality. The idea that marginalized communities would embrace eugenics to combat scientific racism, reminds me how slurs and negative concepts are reclaimed by these same communities that are harmed by such things to bring about improvement or change. This article also made me reflect on if eugenics, in the modern times, could ever have a positive association? I am not sure I have an answer to that. On one hand and thinking about the research I conduct, genomic editing tools such as using CRISPR or AAVs to make changes to genome have become commonplace. Because of the inherent nature of these genetic tools, do they fall under the category of eugenics? They have been used to treat diseases. In a previous course, I had met a patient who had undergone gene therapy to treat his hemophilia, and now no longer requires blood transfusions. But on the other hand, gene editing tools have been used in some cases to make cosmetic edits. The whole idea of human improvement in eugenics comes with deeming certain traits better than the other; thus, marginalizing certain groups of people. Because of the inherent “othering” that comes with eugenics, I can understand how it quickly turned into a negative concept utilized to uphold a racist system rather than breaking it down.
By Erin Hurley, User Services & Accesioning Archivist
June 5, 1981 is widely known as the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the United States because it was the day that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published, in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the appearance of a cluster of diseases that would later come to be known as AIDS (Acquired Immune Difficiency Syndrome). The report, titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles,” was authored by five UCLA doctors: MS Gottlieb, MD, HM Schanker, MD, PT Fan, MD, A Saxon, MD, JD Weisman, DO, of the Division of Clinical Immunology-Allergy at the UCLA Medical Center. The article reports, “In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California.”[1] The primary author of this report, Doctor Michael S. Gottlieb – then 33 years old – made history as the person who discovered AIDS. UCSF Archives & Special Collections is pleased to house Dr. Gottlieb’s archives, which are now processed and available for the first time.
Photo of Dr. Michael Gottlieb by Elizabeth Nathane, originally published in the Los Angeles Blade
A record of his professional life and accomplishments, as well as the many honors and awards he received over the course of his career, the Michael S. Gottlieb papers contain published papers by Gottlieb and many others on AIDS-related topics. They also include information on various AIDS drug treatment studies (including AZT), professional and personal correspondence, and information about various talks and events attended by Gottlieb during the 1980s – a busy decade for him. They also document his prodigious philanthropic activities and AIDS advocacy.
Gottlieb figures prominently in this UCSF-generated timeline of the AIDS epidemic. The timeline, which begins with the 1981 MMWR report, notes that, in 1985, Rock Hudson – star of classic Hollywood films like Giant, All That Heaven Allows, and Written on the Wind – announced that he had AIDS and later died, becoming “the first major celebrity to succumb to the disease.”[1] Later that same year, the timeline reports, “The American Foundation for AIDS Research is founded with the help of movie star Elizabeth Taylor.” Gottlieb, who served as Rock Hudson’s physician from the time of his AIDS diagnosis to his death from the disease, was also one of the founding chairs of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, along with medical researcher Mathilde Krim and Taylor, who was a close friend of Hudson’s and his costar in Giant. The Foundation was established with a $250,000 gift from Hudson’s estate. The Gottlieb papers also contain a fascinating trove of letters, which he dubbed “Crazy letters,” that he received after becoming publicly associated with Hudson in newspapers and the press. The letters indicate a fascination with the disease, which was still very new and widely misunderstood by the world at large.
If you’re interested in checking out the Michael S. Gottlieb papers, you can consult the finding aid or the library catalog record for the collection. The papers were a gift from Michael Gottlieb.
Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our two newest summer interns, May Yuan and Lianne de Leon!
May and Lianne are both participating in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Career Pathway Summer Fellowship Program. This six-week program provides opportunities for high school students to gain work experience in a variety of industries and to expand their learning and skills outside of the classroom. Lianne and May will be working (remotely) with the UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL), and we are grateful to SFUSD and its partners for sponsoring these internships.
May and Lianne will be working on several collection description projects with IDL this summer, including correcting and enhancing document metadata, and creating descriptions for audio-visual materials. They have provided their introductions below.
My name is May Yuan and I’m a junior at Raoul Wallenberg Traditional High School. During my free time, I enjoy reading, learning and trying new things, and helping others academically. I’m super excited to work here at the UCSF IDL to help provide valuable information to the public as well as learn more about the various documents, lawsuits, etc. myself; I also hope to enhance my productivity and organization skills during my time working here as these skills are crucial to college and everyday life in general. The career paths I’m interested in are bioengineering (bioinformatics/biostatistics), law, and finance.
IDL Summer Intern May Yuan
Hi, my name is Lianne R. de Leon. I am a part of the Class of 2023 at Phillip and Sala Burton High School. In the past, I have worked on VEX EDR Robotics competition in 2018-2019. In my spare time I enjoy trying new foods and yoga. I aspire to become a computer hardware engineer and to travel across the entirety of Asia. I look forward to meeting and working with you all.
This is a guest post byJackie Roger, Ph.D. Candidate, UCSF Program in Bioinformatics (BI)
During our class on 5/21, we learned about the term “biopolitics”. After our discussion in class, I wanted to learn more about it and ended up doing some additional reading. Biopolitics, conceptualized by Michel Foucault, is the intersection of life and politics. In practice, it is the governance and control of human life. Many of the topics that we have covered in class can be contextualized within biopolitics.
On 5/17 we talked about forced sterilizations in California prisons. This was a mechanism for controlling who could and could not procreate, and was deeply rooted in white supremacist ideologies. On 5/24 we discussed the hysteria in the 1980s about the “crack baby epidemic” that never ended up happening and had no reasonable scientific basis. There was widespread panic about the possibility of babies born with physical and cognitive disabilities, but little concern about the lack of resources and support for women with substance use disorders. In both of these examples, the focus was on the child-bearing potential of women, and not on the personhood of women. Both forced sterilizations and public hysteria were used to police who should be having children.
On 5/19 we reviewed the Tuskegee syphilis study, and on 5/26 we drew parallels between the racial disparities of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and the ongoing COVID pandemic. In all three of these examples, the medical system prioritized white lives over black lives. There was significant investment in caring for white patients, while black patients were often neglected or mistreated.
This is a guest post by Dr. Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen, a primary care doctor and researcher at UCSF and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
As social distancing rules and regulations begin to relax, many of us are feeling the strain of prolonged social isolation and re-learning how to reach out to others.
On April 29th, 2021, 48 San Francisco and UCSF community members gathered virtually during the lunch hour on Zoom for a series of poetry readings and discussion centered around the human experience of medicine. Farah Hamade, the inaugural UCSF Library Artist-in-Residence, took visual notes and created an art piece that represents the event and experience (featured below).
Three poets—Kathleen McClung, Sharon Pretti, and Peggy Tahir—were selected through a submissions process from the San Francisco community to read their work. Sharon Pretti read a series of poems written during and after her brother’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, treatment, and eventual death. Kathleen McClung read a sequence of sonnets inspired by her partner and her experiences navigating his treatment and surgery for a pituitary mass.
Peggy Tahir read a series of poems written for each radiation treatment she underwent for breast cancer. The readings were followed by a 10-second pause to create space for reflection and a rich discussion.
The introduction of the event and poetry readings were recorded with the poets’ permission. The recording was turned off for the discussion and closing to create a more comfortable, intimate space. After the event, the poetry reading recording, Farah Hamade’s art piece and a poem by Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen was shared with event registrants and the public.
Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Khushi Bhat, who will be conducting a remote internship with the UCSF Industry Documents Library (IDL) this summer.
Khushi is currently a rising senior at Rutgers University where she is majoring in Biotechnology and minoring in Computer Science. This summer, she is working in the Industry Documents Library researching tools and methods to extract geographic locations from a collection of documents related to the tobacco industry’s influence in public policy.
Khushi will be conducting an independent course project to help the IDL team enhance descriptive metadata for our industry documents collections. We have long been aware of a research need to be able to filter documents by geographic location. Tobacco control researchers and other public health experts at UCSF and around the world use the documents in the Industry Documents Library to understand how corporations impact public health. This research is often used to inform policymakers who write laws and policies regulating the sale and use of products such as tobacco. Researchers and policymakers need information which relates to their local area such as their city, county, state, or country.
Geographic location is not currently included in IDL’s document-level metadata, and since IDL contains more than 15 million documents it is not feasible to manually catalog this information.
Khushi’s work will focus on researching Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) text analysis methods. She will investigate available tools which have the potential to automatically identify and label geographic information in text. Khushi’s research, recommendations, and pilot testing will help the IDL team outline workflows and strategies for enhancing our document metadata to include geographic information.
Khushi aspires to pursue a career in bioinformatics in the future and intends on pursuing higher education in this field upon graduation. In her spare time, Khushi enjoys dancing, baking, and hiking. Prior to joining Rutgers, she was an avid Taekwondo practitioner (and has a 2nd degree black belt to show for it!)
This is a guest post by LauraAnn Schmidberger, Ph.D. Candidate, UCSF Tetrad Graduate Program
Doctors and other scientists are trained to be precise in how they word their hypotheses, methods, and findings, because they know that precision is important in the fields of medicine and science. However, this accuracy does not seem to follow them as they cross into the social sciences. The article “On Racism: A New Standard For Publishing On Racial Health Inequities” highlights some examples of the careless ways scientists discuss race in their studies.
Scientists often say that “societal factors” may contribute to the health disparities they see in Black communities, but they fail to ask what causes those social disparities—that is, racism. This is like attempting to treat a cancer patient’s pain, fatigue, weight loss, and other symptoms instead of acknowledging that they have cancer and attempting to remedy that root cause.
Similarly, we need to examine and begin to treat the root cause of health disparities. Perhaps Black communities do face more financial stress or lack easy access to healthcare, but these are symptoms of the larger issue of pervasive systemic racism. The article points out that there is an abundance of scholarship (largely by Black authors) on the topic of “how racism shapes conditions germane to racial health inequities.” It is not that scientists don’t have access to this information, but that they choose to ignore it or gloss over it for less accurate and less meaningful conclusions.
I also appreciated the distinction the article offers between different types of racism: “interpersonal, institutionalized, or internalized.” While all racism is structural, it can express itself in different ways that all need to be addressed; we can think of these like different types of cancer which require different treatments. Many cancer patients may benefit from chemotherapy, but knowing where the tumor is might allow it to be removed surgically. Knowing the origin of the racism and how it is perpetuated in a given scenario can give us better tools to eradicate it. For example, interpersonal racism may be combated with education on critical race theory, while institutional racism might require breaking down the old systems built on inequalities (i.e. abolition rather than reform).
Another example of imprecise language arises from the issue of trust. One of the “social disparities” clinicians often point to is the lack of trust that Black individuals and communities feel for the medical community. However, as the article notes, “assertions that patient mistrust drives disparities obscures the etiologies of racial health inequities and tacitly blames affected patients for their disproportionate suffering.” In other words, saying that Black patients suffer from diseases either more frequently or more severely because they don’t trust doctors to help them is a form of victim-blaming. It is not the Black community that has decided not to trust doctors; it is the medical community that has, through both assaults on and apathy towards Black individuals, actively dismantled any good relationship the two groups might have had.
Issues of mistrust have arisen not because of the one event alone (such as the Tuskegee experiments), but because of both historic and ongoing micro- and macro- aggressions against marginalized groups, and these can only be addressed by addressing their root cause: racism. Largely white medical institutions continue to prove themselves undeserving of the trust of BIPOC communities because they continue to perpetuate racism in a multitude of ways, from continuing to utilize race corrections and other concepts that reify biological theories of race, to repeatedly marginalizing and otherwise failing Black faculty and students. While trust between patient and doctor (as well as patient community and healthcare community) is an important factor to consider, “incessant racial health inequities… reveal less about what patients have failed to feel and more about what systems have failed to do.”
Medicine loves precision. A person does not just have lung cancer, they have non-small cell lung squamous-cell carcinoma, or perhaps pulmonary enteric adenocarcinoma. However, when it comes to understanding the disparities between patients of different races, the desire for exactness seems to disappear and is replaced with hesitant generalizations. This is not unique to science, but appears in many corners of society, especially as discussions of race become more common. However, scientists have the ability to give the topic the accuracy it deserves by becoming familiar with the growing wealth of scholarship on the relationship between racism and health disparities and citing it in our own research. Language matters, and taking more care in our wording as it relates to race and medicine is one simple step to combating racism in the field.
