Library Open House and Exhibit

Join us this Wednesday, March 16, from 12noon-2pm for an afternoon of activities and history! View the newly opened Library exhibit, An Engine of Inquiry and Change: The UCSF Library, and take a sneak peek at the soon-to-open Makers Lab.

Meet us on the main floor of the UCSF Library for 3D printing demos, knitting, coloring, and more at the Makers Lab preview. Talk to a roaming Library expert to get your questions answered and learn more about how the Library serves students, faculty and staff. View silent films from the Archives and Special Collections then head to the 5th floor to explore the exhibit.

An Engine of Inquiry and Change: The UCSF Library celebrates 150 years of growth, evolution, and user-centered service at the UCSF Library. Discover how the collection grew from less than 2,000 volumes into one of the world’s preeminent health sciences libraries.

View rare books and medical artifacts from the Archives and Special Collections and learn about exciting, technologically-advanced tools for the post-digital age. And don’t forget to “catalog” your Library memories and ideas for the future at our interactive card catalog display!

Sign up here to attend the event. The exhibit runs March 2016-March 2017.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May Video Capsule at Bay Area Video Coalition

This is the second year we’ll be participating in this event to celebrate local audiovisual treasures. The breadth of last year’s showing was immense– so many facets of Bay Area history were represented. This year we’re contributing a couple of clips from the UCSF School of Pharmacy of the 1960s.

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Join Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Preservation program staff for an evening of audiovisual preservation revelry. Anchored by recent selections from BAVC’s Preservation Access Program* (PAP), tonight’s program includes archivist favorites, unexpected gems, and rarely seen treats from artist-and arts organization-participants in PAP, as well as from other Bay Area preservation organizations— including Stanford Media Preservation Lab, Internet Archive, Oddball Films, UCSF Archives, the GLBT Historical Society and California Audiovisual Preservation Project. We look forward to sharing recent and prized preservation work for what is sure to be a congenial celebration of archival craft and our media legacy.

When: May 14, 2015 | 7PM |

Where: BAVC | 2727 Mariposa St., 2nd Flr. San Francisco, CA 94110

Admission: $10 suggested donation. Let us know you’re coming. RSVP here!

We hope to see you there! And if you’d like to see what we screened last year, click over to the Internet Archive to see UCSF’s moving memento films from the 1930s.

Happy National Library Week!

In observance of this lovely celebratory week, we bring you a few images of UCSF Library staff and librarians in their natural habitat from the 1950s.

 

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Photograph collection, Medical Sciences Building – The Library

Above, the entrance way to the old UCSF Library, in the Medical Sciences building, in 1959. Check out our previous post that expands a bit on the history of that library.

 

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Photograph collection, Medical Sciences Building – The Library

Tidying the current periodicals section in the 1950s.

 

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Photograph collection, Medical Sciences Building – The Library

Librarians of the Catalog Department (note card catalogs in the background) in the fall of 1958.

 

Through the Eyes of an Intern

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Hi everyone, my name is Armani Fontanilla and I am an undergraduate student at the University of San Francisco interning at the UCSF Archives & Special Collections.

At the archives, I am currently tasked with the processing of small box collections, or the creation of box level inventories and the digitizing, and creation of, metadata for the archives that have yet to be placed into the virtual catalog. Other projects that I am potentially tasked with are research for the upcoming 150th Anniversary of UCSF on the level of researching stories, scanning images, and looking for documents, as well as helping with the vast inventory of the Medical Artifacts collection.

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It’s restricted for a reason. We can’t reveal why. All you need to know is Maggie has the really cool “restricted” stamp. It’s actually really cool.

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And wow is our inventory big… Get it? Because the texts are big?

Even though the potential projects are only potential projects, my senior co-workers, Maggie and Kelsi have both taught me a lot in the projects that I am currently working on. For example, Kelsi has taught me about her work with the Medical Artifacts collection: How the UCSF catalogs have changed from one form to another, and that cross-referencing catalogs with each new edition that has come through the library archives since 1864, one also has to decipher the writings and annotations of previous archivists, as well as come up with new ways to reorganize the collections in our possession.

Maggie, on the other hand, has taught me how to do the projects that I am currently doing, as opposed to the potential projects that Kelsi lets me shadow every so often. She has taught me proper labeling procedure, and storage techniques, as well as projects that mirror the one that Kelsi is currently doing, which would be creating catalogs for documents in storage.

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Cataloging kind of like this, but more modern.

Finally, the first project (that I am still working on when I’m not being taught by Maggie or Kelsi, is the creation of a digital inventory of UCSF affiliates and members. Fortunately, most of the physical inventory is in English, and it is all on-site. Unfortunately, the physical inventory itself is not backed up – folders that are not archival standard need to be replaced, labels need to be printed out because of the inconsistent handwriting of previous archivists (and this intern’s), and more files need to be created for the ever expanding role of UCSF affiliated persons who are recognized in the news worldwide – from China, to America, to Brazil, to the Philippines, UCSF’s impact on the world is growing. And my first, and current job, is to help sort the files so that we can keep track of them for people to use and peruse in the future.

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Before this data can hit the internet, I need make sure they’re all in order.

Within these jumbled folders, however, lie treasures that I am so excited to find. While often the files just contain one or two articles, some contain as many as ten plus! And these articles are often varied – they come in the form of obituaries, photocopied documents, magazine clippings, newspaper articles, biographies, and more! But instead of letting me describe them, let me show you some examples.

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A button with 1989 Nobel Prize Winners Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus.

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Brown, Leatha. School of Nursing, Class of 1928.

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Holt A. Cheng, 1904. He was the first Chinese to be licensed to practice medicine in California after graduating from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in San Francisco. After returning to China, he established the Guang Hua Medical Society, the first medical college of western medicine established by the Chinese, for the Chinese, and the first medical school to accept female applicants.

And finally, the UCSF archives are not only home to just Western schools of thought in medicine, but include Eastern Thought as well. On site and in a state-of-the art archival room, various Eastern texts in Chinese and Japanese are stored, either purchased by the Head Archivist, donated to UCSF, or willed by their owners.

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Chinese medical texts in the archival room.

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Japanese medical texts.

 

Armani Fontanilla

Armani Fontanilla

Armani is currently a senior majoring in History with an emphasis on European and Asian Studies in the University of San Francisco (USF) public history program. After he graduates, he hopes to be able to earn a teaching position at his old high school, Bellarmine College Preparatory, and eventually pursue a Masters. In choosing the UCSF archives through the USF internship program, he hopes to not only practice skills that can only be found through working at an established institution but to also enhance his ability to do archival work and explore history of Western medicine at the archives.

 

New AIDS history exhibits at the library

We would like to invite all of you to visit two new exhibits currently on view at the UCSF Library:

Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture
This banner exhibition utilizes a variety of historic photographs, pamphlets, and publications to illustrate how a group of people responded, or failed to respond, to HIV/AIDS. The title Surviving and Thriving comes from a book written in 1987 by and for people with AIDS that insisted people could live with AIDS, not just die from it. Jennifer Brier, the exhibition curator, explains that “centering the experience of people with AIDS in the exhibition allows us to see how critical they were, and continue to be, in the political and medical fight against HIV/AIDS.” Surviving and Thriving presents their stories alongside those of others involved in the national AIDS crisis. NLM curators used several images and documents from the UCSF Archives in the exhibit and its companion website: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/survivingandthriving/. This travelling NLM exhibit will be at the library until January 4th, 2014. UCSF is the only location in the Northern California to host this exhibit. Please check this page for location and hours.

National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) travelling exhibit "Surviving & Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture" on display at the UCSF library.

National Library of Medicine (NLM) travelling exhibit “Surviving & Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture” on display at the UCSF library.

UCSF AIDS History Project: Documenting the Epidemic
The UCSF Archives and Special Collections organized a companion exhibit that showcases materials from the AIDS History Project (AHP). The AHP began in 1987 as a joint effort of historians, archivists, AIDS activists, health care providers, and others to secure historically significant resources about the response to the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. This collection includes selected records from numerous AIDS-related agencies and community-based organizations in the Bay Area, diaries from AIDS activists, papers of clinicians, health care workers, and researchers working at SFGH and UCSF, as well as materials collected by social scientists and journalists. AHP continues to grow and its collections remain the most heavily used among Archives’ manuscript holdings.

The original Ward 86 doctors: Paul Volberding, Connie Wofsy, and Donald Abrams. Photo from Ward 84/86 Records, MSS 94-61. Courtesy of UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

The original Ward 86 doctors: Paul Volberding, Connie Wofsy, and Donald Abrams.
Photo from Ward 84/86 Records, MSS 94-61. Courtesy of UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

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UCSF Tobacco Control Oral History Collection

You may know that the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education here at UCSF is an internationally respected collaborative effort dedicated to reducing deaths associated with tobacco and the tobacco industry, conducting research in the areas of how to treat tobacco addiction, the effects of second hand smoke, and other tobacco-related topics.  The Center works closely with the UCSF Library on the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library to collect and preserve documents created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities.  Our next activity together?  Processing the UCSF Tobacco Control Oral History Collection –  interviews with 150 physicians, epidemiologists, public health officials, community-based activists and educators, lobbyists and policy makers – all working in the area of tobacco control.

An interview with Stanton Glantz, Ph.D. Center Director and the American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control at UCSF revealed that the Oral History project, conducted between 1994-2001, was an integral part of his National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded project to travel to 24 states and complete detailed histories of tobacco control policymaking and efforts by the tobacco industry to thwart these policies.  As Dr. Glantz and members of his research group travelled the country, they found key informants and recorded the interviews that would become part of this collection.  In part, these interviews helped inform the resulting Reports on State Tobacco Policy Making.  And the project goes on.  As state reports are continually researched, written and published, more interviews with individuals who can shed particular light on political activities and state tobacco control programs are conducted and recorded.

So, check back here next month to see how you can find out what is available, and how you can access and listen to this collection of cassette tapes!

René Radusky
UCSF Archives intern and student at San José State University, School of Library and Information Science concentrating in Archival Studies and Records Management

Rotating Art Program and Portraits in the Reading Room

Here at the Archives & Special Collections we have, in addition to papers, books, and artifacts, a collection of works of art. This collection is widely unknown on campus due to our limited ability to showcase the pieces. However, this anonymity will come to an end with our new rotating art program. Through this initiative, we will be displaying different pieces of art on the walls of our reading room and changing them approximately every three months.

The inaugural works are two portraits of people significant to UCSF’s history– John Bertrand deCusance Morant Saunders, M.D. and William John Kerr, M.D.

William John Kerr, M.D. Alfred Jonniaux (Belgian, 1882-1974) 1949

William John Kerr, M.D.
Alfred Jonniaux (Belgian, 1882-1974)
1949

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Update & Alumna Spotlight: Medical Sciences Library Photograph

We were thrilled to find out that a UCSF alumna spotted herself in one of the photographs of the old Medical Sciences library! New library Med Sci

Sally Alpers Arney is shown sitting at the table, third from the left, looking, I think we can all agree, extremely studious. At the time the photograph was taken, 1958, Sally was in her first year of the UCSF nursing program. She left the nursing school after that year and later graduated from the UCSF physical therapy program in 1961.

Sally Alpers, Medi-Cal, 1961

Sally Alpers, Medi-Cal yearbook, 1961

Sally was kind enough to share a few memories about UCSF, student life pre-women’s movement, and what she’s been up to for the last 50 years or so. Read on..

“My favorite memories were of having dinner with my classmates and the medical students in the cafeteria.  Most, if not all, of the medical students were guys, all of the nursing classmates were “girls”.  It was the olden days in the Fifties.

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Welcome!

Welcome to the UCSF Archives and Special Collections blog! It will feature new acquisitions, highlight existing collections and unique items, provide updates on processing and digitization projects, services, exhibits and special events.

The posts are written by archives staff: Polina Ilieva, UCSF Archivist and Margaret Hughes, UCSF Assistant Archivist. We are also looking forward to working with invited bloggers and guests. Please let us know if you would like to hear more about a specific topic or item from our holdings and use the comment section to share your thoughts.