World AIDS Day 2013: Gems of the Collection revisited

This is a belated thank you to all those who attended both the Gems of the Collection and evening seminar on 2nd December to mark World AIDS Day 2013. The two events allowed us to showcase some of the items within the collections currently being catalogued in the School archives. It was great to see people engaging with the collections and also to meet a number of people who are currently studying or researching the disease.

The lunchtime Gems session attracted around 47 people and included items from each of the six collections along with a sample of the Library's HIV/AIDS pamphlets and books. Items included:

• An array of documents relating to Peter Piot's tenure as Executive-Director of UNAIDS including the first newsletter of the organization and a series of his travel files that conveyed the hectic, global role the position entailed. The material also included a letter from former President Thabo Mbeki to Piot describing at length his understanding of AIDS in 2000, when the South African government would not endorse the view that HIV caused AIDS.

• Within the AIDS Social History Programme material on display there was public health campaign material from both UK and European governments collected from the 1980s-1990s. 

 The Programme was co-directed by Professor Virginia Berridge and is a great resource for examining HIV/AIDS within the United Kingdom thanks to its mixture of publications and reports from central government, local government and voluntary groups about tackling the epidemic.

• The papers of Professor Kaye Wellings' provide a wealth of information about AIDS public health campaigns in Europe and it's extensive newspaper clippings document the early reporting and hysteria within the popular press. 

          Relating to this the Centre of Sexual and Reproductive Health collection highlight the visual power of the AIDS public health campaigns through the posters, postcards, badges and condom packages produced by European countries in the 1980s-1990s.

          It also shows the range of mediums used to convey public health messages most notably the use of graphic novels in Belgium and Italy respectively.

• This sample of the SIGMA research archives documents the lobbying efforts of the group to lower the age of homosexual consent to be equal to heterosexual age of consent in 1994. The archive contains a number of letters received from serving MP's both expressing their support and opposition to the amendment. 

World AIDS Day 2013: Launch of AIDS awareness poster gallery on Flickr

To complement last night's excellent talk on the HIV/AIDS posters at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the archives has created an online gallery of  HIV/AIDS posters within our collection on Flickr, Global Visions: HIV/AIDS posters at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine archives. The posters provide a snapshot of the diversity of designs and messages used in AIDS public awareness campaigns across Europe.

The majority of the posters were collected as part of the European Commission (EC) 'Concerted Action on Assessment of AIDS/HIV Prevention Strategies' project, 1989-1991, the purpose of which was to compare and contrast the different AIDS public health campaigns European countries. It was during the late eighties and early nineties that AIDS was a major concern to European countries as the number of cases rapidly increased and there was a high degree of anxiety and fear in the general population over this fatal disease.

Poster from 1989 the Swiss 'Stop AIDS' campaign that ran from 1987-1995, the poster translates as 'Without? Without me" and was one of a number of designs used to promote the use of condoms 

The posters show how public health campaigners and voluntary organisations tried to inform and change behaviour within the general community. The posters display a number of different strategies to convey their message, such as using cartoons to depict risky behaviour for conservative audiences; targeting an emotion response through the use of fear, humour and empowerment and positively representing at risk groups to de-stigmatise and counter misinformation about the disease.  

The Red Ribbon: A donation from Lyn Rothman, a friend of the School

With World AIDS Day soon approaching, it seems opportune to mention a special acquisition that the LSHTM Archive received this September. Following a visit to the archives to view the LSHTM HIV/AIDS collection by Lyn Rothman, the founder of AIDS Crisis Trust and current patron and board member of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, she kindly offered to donate a Red Ribbon pendant designed by her friend, Andrew Logan, the English artist and jewellery-maker.

We received, several weeks later, a parcel containing not only the AIDS Red Ribbon pendant designed by the artist but a note on the pendant from Andrew Logan that Lyn had asked him to write about his creation.

The pendant was designed when the first AIDS ribbons appeared and having seen many of his friends die from AIDS, Andrew felt it was a fitting celebration of their lives.

Polish AIDS awareness poster, c.1990s

The original red ribbon designed by New York-based Visual AIDS Artists Caucus in 1991 as a consciousness raising symbol, not as a commercial or trademark tool, and therefore the original creators wished to remain anonymous and the image is free of copyright.

The first red ribbon worn publicly was by Jeremy Irons at the 1991 Tony Awards and soon became renowned as an international symbol of AIDS awareness, becoming adopted as the symbol of World AIDS Day that same year.

To read more about the history of the Red Ribbon please visit: http://www.worldaidsday.org/the-red-ribbon.php

World AIDS Day Events at LSHTM Archives

For this year's World AIDS Day the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine archives will be hosting two events on the 2nd December 2013.

World AIDS Day: Global Visions

Monday 2^rd December, 6pm-7pm, Manson Lecture Theatre, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT

Evening seminar presenting the HIV/AIDS poster collections held by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine archive and the Wellcome Library.  The Wellcome Library holds one of the world’s largest digitised AIDS poster collections, with over 3000 posters. The LSHTM archives holds sizable collection of its own along with collected campaign ephemera and collected papers. Through the combined archives we shall explore changing attitudes to the disease and the dramatically contrasting cultural attitudes to sex from across the globe.

This joint event organised by the Wellcome Library and the LSHTM Archive will explore the digital and physical poster series of both collections and explore the key themes and contexts of these poster collections through our speakers, Professor Kay Wellings, Professor of Sexual & Reproductive Health Research at LSHTM and donor of the LSHTM poster collection and Julia Nurse, Content Officer at the Wellcome Library and cataloguer of the Wellcome AIDS poster collection.

This event is free though booking is required. http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/world-aids-day-global-visions.aspx

World AIDS Day: Gems of the HIV/AIDS Collection

Monday 2nd December, 12-2pm, Manson Lecture Foyer, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT

The archives and rare book collections will showcase a display of library and archive material from our extensive HIV/AIDS collections. This includes posters, badges, condoms and other ephemera from the Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health (CSRH) collection; UK HIV/AIDS campaign material from the AIDS Social History Programme (1988-1994) and the archives of LSHTM Director, Peter Piot, whose archives reflect his the twenty five year experience in combating HIV/AIDS epidemic as both an epidemiologist and then as Executive-Director of UNAIDS, 1996-2008. 

The event is free and open to all. For more information about the World AIDS Day events or the HIV/AIDS archive collection please contact us, archive@lshtm.ac.uk

Selection of ephemera from the Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health collection