The San Francisco Bay Areas Response to the AIDS Epidemic: Digitizing and Providing Universal Access to Historical AIDS Records

The Archives and Special Collections Archives department of the University of California, San Francisco UCSF Library, seeks a support from the NNLM to digitize approximately 43,000-45,000 pages from 15 archival collections related to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area and make them widely accessible to the public on the Internet. This new digital collection will address the gaps that exist in relation to materials chronicling the experience and struggles of communities of color and marginalized communities in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. This project will make publicly accessible experiences of communities that are absent or excluded from the history of 101 in the United States [Jennifer Brier, The Oral History Review, Volume 45, Issue 1]. Its goal is to include the voices of underrepresented and marginalized groups in the historical record and increase public impact of these archival collections. These collections cover diverse issues communities are faced with: poverty, racial and socio-economic segregation, health care policy inequalities, public health and sexual education and prevention, disparities in the HIV response, the impact of HIV on migrant communities, and the intersection of the criminal justice system and HIV.