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.

Presented at the 2019 Medical Library Association Conference. 

Objective

Impostor phenomenon is the inability to internalize accomplishments while experiencing the fear of being exposed as a fraud. Impostor phenomenon can have serious adverse effects including: anxiety, depression, lack of confidence, decreased job satisfaction and performance, and burnout. Our research objective is to discover effective coping strategies to help health sciences librarians address feelings of impostor phenomenon.

Methods

In our study, the first to measure impostor phenomenon in health science librarians, we distributed an anonymous online survey via REDCap to measure impostor phenomenon among US health sciences librarians and learn about strategies to cope with impostor phenomenon. We used the Harvey Impostor Phenomenon scale (higher scores are associated with feelings of fraudulence) and asked two open-ended questions about coping with feelings of inadequacy at work. The first question asked what strategies respondents used to address these feelings, and the second asked how effective the respondents believed the strategies were. We performed a thematic analysis of the responses to the open-ended questions. 

Results

Our study found that one in seven health sciences librarians experienced impostor phenomenon and, importantly, younger and newer librarians had higher impostor scores. 703 participants completed the survey, of those, 459 answered the open-ended questions. Participants reported many strategies to cope with feelings of inadequacy; 75% reported their strategies were effective. We categorized strategies as either “external” (seeking help outside oneself) or “internal” (coping alone). External strategies include: educational opportunities, mentorship, and talking to others. Internal strategies include: avoidance, “fake it til you make it”, or mindfulness. We found that external strategies were associated with lower impostor scores. 

Conclusions

Feelings of impostor phenomenon can be harmful to those who experience them. Individual librarians, managers, and professional organizations all have a role in addressing impostor phenomenon in the profession. Recognizing the signs of impostor phenomenon and understanding the most effective strategies to cope with it, such as mentoring, colleague support, and educational efforts, are beneficial to health sciences librarians, particularly to younger or newer librarians who experience more feelings of impostorism. 

Learning Outcomes:

Participants will be able to define impostor phenomenon.Participants will be able list 2-3 coping strategies to address impostor phenomenon.Participants will be able to describe the difference between external and internal coping strategies.

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.