New Archives Intern: Maopeli Ali

We’re happy to welcome new intern Maopeli Ali to Archives & Special Collections. Born and raised in San Francisco, Maopeli is currently a sophomore at Kenyon College in Ohio where he is pursuing a major in biology with a minor in Latin. At Kenyon, he also participates in club rugby and is a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Maopeli is a seasoned intern; he has previously worked at various institutions in the Bay Area, including an architecture firm, the Geology Department of the California Academy of Science, and the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). Maopeli is very ambitious, and is proud to be a First Generation to College student. He plans to attend graduate school after completing his undergraduate studies to pursue a Criminal Justice Master Degree in Forensic Science. His career goal is to become a forensics investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Portrait of Maopeli Ali with San Francisco in the background.

New Archives intern Maopeli Ali

Maopeli comes to us as part of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute Summer Research Program. “This program is designed to provide an opportunity for High School and Undergraduate students to immerse themselves in the world of basic and/or clinical research for three months during the summer. The program pairs students with one or two CHORI principal investigators who serve as mentors, guiding the students through the design and testing of their own hypotheses and methodology development. At the end of the summer, students present their research to their peers just as any professional researcher would do.” As a CHORI intern, Maopeli is mentored by Dr. Aimee Medeiros from the UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine and Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections.

Maopeli will be working on digitizing medical records using our newly-implemented scanning lab purchased with funds from UCSF’s RAP Shared Instrument program. He will then have the opportunity to work with some of this data to formulate a research question which can be addressed by the records.

The Archives are a new experience for Maopeli, whose previous work has mostly focused on biology. He is excited to work in this context, and explore ways in which this study can both help the archives and increase awareness within the health sciences fields about the wealth of historical medical data which is available in the archives and records of large health science universities like UCSF.

100+ Years of UCSF Yearbooks Accessible Online: UCSF Partners with Google Books for Digitization Project

The UCSF library is an important UC contributor to the Google Books digitization project. Through the collaboration with the California Digital Library (CDL) digitization team 1,317 volumes from the general and rare book collections were scanned and uploaded to Google Books and HathiTrust, a central repository for digital books.

As part of this project, we also digitized the university publications (yearbooks, announcements, departmental newsletters). These materials are among the most heavily used in archives and requested not only by university departments, but also by people doing genealogical research and alumni. As a result, 460 of these volumes are now full-text accessible on Google Books and HathiTrust sites.

Chaff’98, v.2, yearbook of the College of Dentistry, University of California. College of Dentistry baseball team, 1897-98.

Chaff’98, v.2, yearbook of the College of Dentistry, University of California. College of Dentistry baseball team, 1897-98.

With hundreds of volumes digitized proper organization assures quick and efficient discoverability of these treasures by diverse users. With the help of HathiTrust colleagues at CDL and the University of Michigan, we set up two collections:

University of California, San Francisco collection

This collection contains books, pamphlets, UCSF University Publications, and yearbooks dating back from 16th century through 2000s held at the University of California, San Francisco Library and Special Collections.

UCSF University publications

This collection contains materials published by UCSF schools, programs, and research institutes (course catalogs, announcements, student publications, annual reports, newsletters, etc.) as well as yearbooks dating back from 1864 held at the UCSF Archives. Among them is “The Introductory address delivered by Professor H. H.Toland at the Toland Medical College, San Francisco on Monday, October 24, 1864.”

Please read the full story on the UC Libraries web site and CDL blog.

UCSF Library Google Books Team. Front row: Andy Panado, Polina Ilieva, Bea Mallek, Karen Butter. Back row: Eric Peterson, Art Townsend, Alberto Luna, Tyrone McCloskey, Don Ciccone, Bazil Menezes, David Campbell, Anneliese Taylor. Not pictured: Margaret Hughes, Julia Kochi, Bertha Hall, Lucy Friedland, Mark Zanandrea, David MacFarland, Alan Daniel, Jubeda Azam, Deborah Freeze, Susan Boone and Kirk Hudson.

UCSF Library Google Books Team. Front row: Andy Panado, Polina Ilieva, Bea Mallek, Karen Butter. Back row: Eric Peterson, Art Townsend, Alberto Luna, Tyrone McCloskey, Don Ciccone, Bazil Menezes, David Campbell, Anneliese Taylor. Not pictured: Margaret Hughes, Julia Kochi, Bertha Hall, Lucy Friedland, Mark Zanandrea, David MacFarland, Alan Daniel, Jubeda Azam, Deborah Freeze, Susan Boone and Kirk Hudson.

About CDL
The CDL was founded by the University of California in 1997 to take advantage of emerging technologies that were transforming the way digital information was being published and accessed. Since then, in collaboration with the UC libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world’s largest digital research libraries and changed the ways that faculty, students, and researchers discover and access information. In 2006, CDL and the University of California libraries partnered with Google on a project to digitize millions of books from the campus collections.

About HathiTrust
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.  Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership, currently comprising more than 90 partner libraries. Over the last six years, the partners have contributed more than 11 million volumes to the digital library. More than 3.7 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web. For more information, visit the HathiTrust About page.