UCSF Library

Poster presented at the 2021 Mountain Pacific Health Science Libraries Conference.

In the first study measuring sexual harassment experiences of academic library employees at a single institution, we conducted a census of 1,610 non-student employees at the 10-campus University of California Libraries system. This anonymous online survey measured how sexual harassment was experienced and observed in terms of behaviors, exhibitors, reporting and disclosure, institutional support and betrayal, and recommendations for future actions. Out of 579 respondents, 54% experienced and/or observed sexual harassment at work, 74% did not report their experiences, and University of California Libraries staff were the most frequently reported exhibitors of sexual harassment behaviors. Respondents recommended training, workplace culture change, support from leadership, and clear reporting processes in order to address sexual harassment at University of California Libraries. We aim to raise awareness of this issue and provide tools for health sciences librarians interested in beginning conversations about addressing sexual harassment in their libraries.

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.

Poster presented at the 2017 Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC) Assembly

Background: Librarians contribute expertise to faculty projects but often experience uncertainty around the extent of their involvement in research teams. The librarian’s role, while crucial in many projects, can be ambiguous at best, dismissed at worst, and misunderstood in many cases. Lack of librarian acknowledgement in completed projects highlights the fact that librarians are a highly utilized but undervalued resource. 

Objective: Systematic reviews are a relatively new method of research that require in-depth librarian involvement, but there are no standards within librarianship for negotiating place within systematic review research teams. This poster aims to address key issues librarians face when collaborating on systematic reviews and other research projects. 

Methods: A health sciences librarian, new to health sciences but experienced in academic research and librarianship, created a systematic review service at her library and explored the issues that arose around establishing the librarian’s place in research teams. Issues included confusion about the librarian’s role, a lack of understanding about the systematic review process, and potential awkwardness around librarian acknowledgement and coauthorship. 

Results: Several strategies were utilized to address issues of uncertainty in research collaborations, including the development of a memorandum of understanding that outlined expectations and responsibilities, documentation about the systematic review research process, and the enforcement of mandatory requirements to receive librarian assistance. This poster will report on the current state of the systematic review service, including the librarian coauthorship rate and number of reviews that have reached completion. 

Conclusions: A variety of lessons learned are presented, including tips for addressing key issues in the early phase of establishing the librarian’s role and addressing uncertainty or resistance from research teams. The information presented in this poster is not unique to the health sciences field and can be applied to all academic librarians’ work with faculty. A discussion of strategies for librarians working in a variety of disciplines and settings will be presented. 

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

Presented at the 2017 Charleston Conference.

Background 

In 2022 Library staff launched a project to enhance inclusive library teaching practices and foster collaboration among library educators. This project stemmed from a larger theme in the Library’s 2020-2025 strategic plan that aimed to build the reputation of library staff as essential campus educators. The key objectives of the project were to establish a community of practice for library educators, and develop a comprehensive guide to equitable teaching in the Library.

Description 

The project team brought together librarians and staff from across the Library, representing diverse teaching expertise and education backgrounds. The team met monthly from late 2022 to the end of 2025 to develop the project goals, plan the Library Educators Community of Practice meetings, and design and launch the Equitable Teaching Guide. The first major milestone was the creation of the Library Educators Community of Practice, a bi-monthly meeting to foster collaboration and solidarity of library staff through structured meet-ups and unstructured discussions. Guided by input from Library staff the project team hosted 13 meetups from 2023-2025 with topics ranging from disability accommodations, to universal design for learning, to how AI is changing our teaching. The second milestone focused on developing an inclusive teaching guide that collects best practices from library staff to create equitable and inclusive learning environments. The team conducted research on existing guides and solicited input from library staff to create a repository of best practices, workflows, templates, and instructional resources. To evaluate their work on the milestones the team solicited iterative feedback on community programming and performed ongoing assessment of guide use.

Conclusions 

The response to both of the project initiatives has been strong. The Library Educator meetups generally include 9-16 attendees, representing a substantial percentage of teaching staff. The guide was officially launched in October of 2025, and at the time of abstract submission has received 25 views. To continue the project goals past the end of the project term the team created a sustainability plan. Two new members were selected to coordinate the sessions for the Library educators community of practice, with the intention that these roles rotate each year. One team member took on the role of maintaining and continuing to solicit content for the guide, with the idea that this would also be a rotating role.

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

BACKGROUND: Leadership development programs are integral to the future success of public health and healthcare organisations. Despite low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) bearing a greater burden of unmet medical needs, fewer professional development opportunities exist in these settings. This study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of available leadership development programs for healthcare professionals in LMICs. METHODS: This study conforms to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis-P systematic review and traditional meta-analyses guidelines. Articles were identified through five academic databases: Embase, PubMed, Web of Science, ERIC, and Business Source Complete. Eligibility criteria included original research published in peer-reviewed journals on non-clinical, leadership development programs offered to healthcare professionals in LMICs worldwide. RESULTS: Forty-one peer-reviewed articles met inclusion criteria, of which physicians, nurses, and public health professionals were the most common types of providers to attend leadership development programs; no programs exclusively targeted surgeons. The greatest proportion of programs were short-term interventions (ranging from 1 day to 12 weeks). Communication, organizational structure and leadership, and personal development were identified as the three most common leadership themes in the review. Regionally, leadership programs were reported most commonly in Africa, specifically in Anglophone countries. Other regions worldwide, including Latin America and the Caribbean, were underrepresented in the review. CONCLUSIONS: The findings from this review identify gaps in leadership development programs for certain groups of healthcare professionals from certain geographical regions, supporting the need for further provision of and participation in these opportunities in LMICs.

ObjectiveThis systematic review assesses the association of tooth loss (TL), as the exposure, with morbidity and mortality by diabetes mellitus (DM) status, as the outcome, in older adults.BackgroundIndividuals with DM have higher prevalence of severe TL and increased risk of developing morbidities and mortality. No systematic review has evaluated the association between TL with morbidity and mortality by DM status.Material and methodsComprehensive searches used multiple publication databases containing reports published between 01/01/2000 and 04/21/2021. Two authors independently evaluated included studies for quality and risk of bias using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) checklist for cohort and Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) critical appraisal sheet for cross-sectional studies, while a third author arbitrated decisions to resolve disagreements.ResultsThirteen studies met the inclusion criteria: eight cross-sectional and five cohort. Qualitative review of the included studies indicated TL is associated with increased incidence and prevalence of DM. TL is also associated with DM-related morbidities including greater prevalence of heart disease, diabetic retinopathy, metabolic syndrome; poorer health-related quality of life; poorer survival of participants with chronic kidney disease; and increased medical expenditure. Overall, the quality of the evidence reviewed was medium, as per the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine 2011 Levels of Evidence.Conclusions/practical implicationsThis review found significant associations of TL with prevalence and incidence of DM and adverse DM-related outcomes. An interprofessional team-care approach that includes an oral health component could benefit the prevention and management of DM.

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.

“Global AIDS Posters and the Visual Language of Horror” is an examination of how the AIDS crisis was communicated through visual culture and how the imagery was often based on a rhetoric of horror. Global aids posters and the language used to describe the epidemic, though well-intended, worked together to shape a public perception that was harmful to the AIDS patient during this time of uncertainty.

In the case of the language used to describe the epidemic, the slide deck includes data showing that newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, often referred to as newspapers of record, repeatedly used terms such as “plague,” “silent killer,” and “scourge” at the height of the crisis. Over time, this rhetoric influenced and became part of a larger visual and cultural dialogue that determined how AIDS was depicted in posters around the world. As amply demonstrated in the slide deck, many of these posters used skeletal forms, dark imagery, or metaphors tied to death, decay, contamination, and contagion, which are all widely used horror tropes. These tropes, it is assumed, were meant to communicate urgency, but the reality is that they also risked reinforcing harmful ideas about those living with the disease. In other words, the visual culture emphasized the horror of the patient more than it prevented the spread of the disease.

The rhetoric of horror and fear-based messaging was not accidental. As has occurred in previous widespread outbreaks of disease, during moments when people are trying to make sense of something they do not fully comprehend, horror provides a familiar framework within which to discuss, communicate, and address the disease. However, this sometimes comes at a cost. The slide deck, hopefully, indicates that there is always a tension between raising awareness and contributing to stigma. In other words, public health messaging cannot help but be shaped by cultural habits and visual traditions, not just neutral medical facts. These posters may perhaps encourage us to think more carefully about how images and rhetoric affect perception, especially during moments of crisis.