For the last 3 years, UCSF Archives & Special Collections has been working to provide access our archival collections documenting the lived experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic “as data.” That last part — “as data” — can be admittedly opaque. Is it not all data? Are all the digitized collections we post to Calisphere and elsewhere not “data” already? What we mean when we say this is that we are providing access to the collections, and their accompanying metadata, in bulk as one download. We’ve been talking about this work as the “No More Silence project.”

We’re excited to announce that this work now has a public home on our website, and that you can access almost all of the various outputs of this project in one single location — even better than a convenience store! That location is here: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/data-projects/.

One of the exciting things about the No More Silence project was the way it started with the goal to provide access to the collections as data, but quickly grew to include community building and teaching around this newly-created data resource. The naivete of our “build it and they will come” approach is something that deserves an entire blog post of its own, but the point here is that there were classes, webinars, and computer code that all ended up coming out of this project. We’re excited to be able to make all of those things available to whoever wants to use them as well.

In addition, this project benefitted immensely from the partnerships we were able to undertake with people outside of the UCSF Campus community as well. It’s especially important to thank Dr. Clair Kronk, postdoctoral fellow in medical informatics at the Yale University School of Medicine and creator of the Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation Ontology, and Krü Maekdo, founder of the Black Lesbian Archives.

Check it all out here: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/data-projects/

This project was supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services or the California State Library, and no official endorsement by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services or the California State Library should be inferred.