UCSF Library

The mission of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is Advancing Health Worldwide. To that end, the campus engages in outreach to low-and-middle-income countries through research collaborations and other outreach activities.  The education and research librarians at the UCSF Library actively work with researchers and programs engaged in global health programming and projects, and provide educational support and online training for learners in Africa and other developing countries. UCSF research librarians support those working in UCSF’s Institute for Global Health, the Global Brain Health Institute, and UCSF’s Global Cancer Program, as well as UCSF School of Medicine projects engaging in global health efforts. This poster will describe the global programming activities on campus and librarian involvement in teaching and supporting learners around the world. The poster will also highlight librarian involvement and collaboration on specific systematic review projects involving researchers from Latin America, Mexico, and Africa. Librarian involvement supports the overall campus mission, but has also led to additional projects and greater visibility for library services and librarian expertise. 

Presented at the American Library Association 2024 Conference.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Library has been actively engaged in promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) goals through a variety of approaches, including outreach and education to targeted campus groups, research collaborations, exhibits and public programming, participation in UC-wide groups, and collections. The library has incorporated DEIA into the library’s strategic plan goals, created rubrics for use in the hiring process, and incorporated DEIA activities and goals into the performance evaluation process for library employees. The University of California has also developed transformative publishing agreements with multiple publishers, allowing UC authors the option of publishing their articles open access with no or low article processing charges (APCs). These agreements allow UC authors to maintain their copyrights and encourage young researchers, LGBTQ+ researchers and other minority researchers to publish and promote their projects from the diversity of our campus populations. All of these activities promote UCSF’s PRIDE values of professionalism, respect, integrity, diversity, and excellence. This poster will highlight numerous activities and initiatives both within the library and on the UCSF campus promoting DEIA and beyond that, the campus mission of Advancing Health Worldwide.  

Presented at the American Library Association 2024 Conference.

The mission of the University of California, San Francisco is Advancing Health Worldwide. There are several different programs across the University providing outreach to and collaborating with health providers and learners in developing countries, and programs reaching out to minority students enrolled in high school and undergraduate programs to encourage interest in careers in the health sciences. The UCSF Library has worked to collaborate with campus groups engaged with minority and marginalized populations. This poster will highlight collaborations with our Global Cancer Program, The UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences, The Global Brain Health Institute, SF BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity), UCSF PUP (Pre-Health Undergraduate Program), NEXGENE Girls program, and the UCSF Summer Student Research Program. The poster will also highlight other types of research collaborations between Librarians and investigators working on projects focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or on minority health both in the U.S., and in low-and-middle-income countries. We will share how these collaborations lead to continuing engagement, published papers, and greater exposure of Librarians as active collaborators in the University’s educational and research enterprise. 

Presented at the 2023 American Library Association Conference.

Presented at the 2017 San Jose State University Open Access Conference.

Presented at the 2017 Charleston Conference.

Presented at the 2015 American Library Association Annual Conference.

Use this elevator pitch template for exercises to create a concise and compelling job position or project description. Examples of the template are included describing two librarian positions as well as an open access policy. The template can be modified to describe a product, organization, or idea.

Published in Against the Grain: Vol. 26: Iss. 2, Article 11, April 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.6696

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We conducted a narrative review of literature focused on Latinx youth in the Juvenile Justice System (JJS). The goal of this review was to identify the behavioral health needs and social and cultural factors that place Latinx youth at disproportionate risk for contact and entrenchment with the JJS. Ecodevelopmental Theory (ET) was used as the guiding framework for this review, and a total of 16 peer reviewed articles from Embase, PsychINFO, and Pubmed were collected, analyzed, and summarized. Consistent with ET, we organized themes from the literature into the following sections: (a) microsystem (i.e., family, psychiatric care, sexual health care, school); (b) mesosystem (i.e., family and social environment); (c) exosystem (i.e., family and neighborhood context, and bicultural stress); and (d) macrosystem (i.e., generational status, cultural stress, social class). Sociopolitical disparities, such as disproportionate sentencing by social class and trauma stemming from political violence, and intersections of cultural variables (e.g., generational status and acculturation) should be closely considered in any prevention and intervention efforts targeting Latinx youths. More research to understand and address the unique needs of this population is also needed.

This report, developed as part of the 2024 UCSF Industry Documents Library Undergraduate Summer Fellowship, examines four distinct projects that leverage natural language processing and data science within the context of the JUUL Labs Collection and the broader IDL. Project One investigates the optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy of low-quality and handwritten documents in the absence of ground truth data. Project Two explores the implementation of embedding search algorithms and visualizations aimed at enhancing the relevance of document recommendations for users. Project Three employs txt-ferret to conduct a thorough scan of a substantial corpus of industry documents to identify sensitive information, including credit card numbers. Finally, Project Four assesses the biases present in large language model (LLM) summarization through the lens of sentiment analysis.

This report, produced as part of the UCSF Archives and Special Collections Summer Fellowship program, explores the efficacy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in processing archival documents. OCR technology, which automates the extraction of text from images, has significantly advanced recently, providing substantial benefits for archival organizations by making vast amounts of previously “hidden” data more accessible. This study specifically examines the disparities in OCR quality between handwritten and typewritten documents, highlighting that OCR’s effectiveness is considerably lower for handwritten texts. This discrepancy results in biases and underrepresentation in datasets, particularly affecting the accessibility and utility of handwritten documents from historical archives.

Utilizing a dataset comprising documents related to AIDS/HIV activism from the 1980s and 1990s, this project evaluates the performance of three OCR tools—Tesseract, Google Cloud Document AI, and Amazon Textract—across different document types. The objective is to identify the most effective OCR solution for enhancing the accessibility of handwritten documents within the UCSF Archives and Special Collections. The findings aim to contribute to the broader archival field by addressing the challenges of digitizing and utilizing handwritten archival materials, thus supporting more inclusive and comprehensive historical research.