Tag Archives: NHPRC

How to Digitize 68,000 Pages of Documents

Posted on by
Reply

Guest post by Heather Wagner, Digitization Coordinator at UC Merced Library

For the Pioneering Child Studies project the UC Merced Library’s Digital Curation and Scholarship unit was tasked with digitizing 68,000 pages of documents. So, how do we go about digitizing 68,000 pages of documents? With some help. That help comes from four undergraduate student assistants who play an important part in the digitization process.

The first part of the process is the actual digitization. Our undergraduate student assistants digitize materials on a variety of equipment. These include high speed document scanners and flatbed scanners for documents, book scanners for bound material, and cameras on stands for oversize or fragile materials.

Student Nicolas Fleming digitizing bound materials using a book scanner

Once the digitization is complete, the next step is quality checking. Students review each image in Adobe Bridge and zoom in to check for issues such as lines in scans or items out of focus. Some images may need minor editing such as straightening and cropping which is completed during the quality checking step in Photoshop. The quality checking step is time consuming but necessary, so we are sure we are receiving the best possible results from digitization.

Student Dathan Hansell quality checking digitized documents.

PDFs with optical character recognition (OCR) are created from the digitized image files so they are accessible to users. OCR makes the PDF document searchable. The PDF documents are then quality checked by the students, and the documents are then optimized. Optimizing the PDF files reduces their file size, which makes them better suited for web viewing. The files are then ready for uploading.

We appreciate the hard work of our undergraduate student assistants. We would not be able to complete digitization projects of this size without them.

Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer Digital Collection Now Available

Posted on by
Reply

UCSF Archives and Special Collections is delighted to announce the publication of the Leona Mayer Bayer Correspondence digital collection on Calisphere. The digitization project is part of the NHPRC grant, Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics. We worked in partnership with UC Merced Library’s Digital Assets Unit towards our goal of digitizing and publishing 68,000 pages from the collections of Drs. Hulda Evelyn Thelander, Helen Fahl Gofman, Selma Fraiberg, Leona Mayer Bayer, and Ms. Carol Hardgrove. To date we have digitized over 59,000 pages. Most digitized material is still undergoing quality assurance (QA) procedures. Here are some items we have digitized from Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer collection.

Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer, 1956. Leona Mayer Bayer Correspondence box 1, folder 9

Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer

Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer received her MD from Stanford University Medical School in 1928. She worked with the Institute of Human Development in Berkeley and focused on child development, human growth, and psychology of sick children. The collection consists of around 400 digitized pages and the collection features professional correspondence of Dr. Leona Mayer Bayer. Some items that may be of interest is her correspondence with Dr. Hilde Bruch and her acceptance remarks for the PSR Broadstreet Pump Award she received in March of 1987.

Hilde Bruch correspondence, 1961. Leona Mayer Bayer Correspondence box 1, folder 1
PSR Broadstreet Pump Award, 1987. Leona Mayer Bayer Correspondence box 1, folder 9

In the next months we will digitize and soon publish our next four collections on Calisphere. Stay tuned for our next update

Laurie Garrett Papers Now Open For Research

Posted on by
Reply

This a post by Project Archivist Edith Martinez

UCSF Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce that the Laurie Garrett papers collection is now processed. The collection’s finding aid is available publicly on the Online Archive of California. The digital collection of the Laurie Garrett papers is also available publicly on Calisphere. It is part of our current National Archive NHPRC grant project “Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections.” 

Laurie Garrett, MSS 2013-03, oversize box 102
Laurie Garrett, MSS 2013-03, oversize box 102

Garrett is a Peabody, Polk, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The collection features her research on HIV/AIDS and public health, correspondence, memorabilia, photographs, book and article drafts Garrett won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for her work chronicling the Ebola virus in Zaire published in Newsday. She is also a bestselling author of the book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Garrett has worked for National Public Radio, Newsday, and was a senior fellow for The Council of Foreign Relations. She has won many awards including the Award of Excellence from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Bob Considine Award of the Overseas Press Club of America. Researchers are already using the collection and have found great interest in her work.

AIDS Education, MSS 2013-03, carton 25, folder 6

The collection is organized into seven series which include research and subject files, correspondence, newsletters, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health and The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance drafts and notes, conferences, non-print material, correspondence, and memorabilia

Scrapbook, MSS 2013-03, oversize box 104
Scrapbook, MSS 2013-03, oversize box 104

You can view the collection finding aid on the Online Archive of California. If you would like to visit the UCSF Archives and Special Collections and work with the complete physical collection, please make an appointment with us.

NHPRC awarded a grant to UCSF Archives and Special Collections

Posted on by
2

NHPRC logo

UCSF Archives and Special Collections (A&SC) is pleased to announce it has been awarded a 2016 National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) grant from the National Archives in support of the project, Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections, an expansion of the AIDS History Project (AHP).

The project will greatly expand the historical record of San Francisco’s broad-based response to the AIDS public health crisis, and make discoverable and accessible by a wide audience a new corpus of materials related to the evolution of that response. These collections reveal breakthroughs in containing the AIDS epidemic and treating AIDS patients that were made possible by the collaborative efforts of educators, researchers, clinicians, and community advocates. The collections included in this grant are interconnected and form a unique body of research materials.

Dr. Selma Dritz, ca. 1982. MSS 2001-04.

The $86,258 award will aid in creating and making accessible detailed finding aids for seven recently acquired collections comprising a total of 373 linear feet. These collections range from the research files of science writer Laurie Garrett and the papers of Drs. Don Francis and John Greenspan of UCSF and Selma Dritz of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, to the records of two UCSF entities, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the AIDS Health Project, and files from the early and pioneering publication AIDS Treatment News, produced by community activist John James. Diverse audiences will benefit from having access to the archival collections comprising this new project. They include scholars and students in disciplines such as history, literature, medicine, jurisprudence, journalism, and sociology,and members of the general public pursuing individual areas of interest, especially younger members of the GLBT community who seek a better understanding of this important period in history.

A small portion of the collections will be digitized and made accessible online. This 18-month project will commence on March 1, 2017.

A&SC would like to thank the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, the California Historical Records Advisory Board, and other supporters for their help with this proposal.

About UCSF Archives & Special Collections
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.

Please contact Polina Ilieva, Head of UCSF Archives & Special Collections with questions about this award.

Download a copy of the press release ArchivesJan2017_NHPRC_grant.