First batch of HIV Filmed Interviews made publicly accessible
We are delighted to announce that the first 40 interviews of the National HIV Story Trust (NHST) are now available to view in the Mediatheque at London Metropolitan Archives (LMA).
The interviews have been made accessible thanks to a substantial grant by the Wellcome Trust, through its Research Resources in Medical History scheme, that funded the extensive cataloguing and digital editing required to make each film available.
The filmed interviews were compiled by the National HIV Story Trust (NHST) to record the personal stories of people who lived through and were affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom and were filmed between 2015-2017. The project set out to document the first-hand accounts of 100 individuals whose lives were shaped by the HIV epidemic, including those diagnosed with the virus in the 1980s-1990s, the carers and friends who supported and sadly lost loved ones during the epidemic, and the healthcare workers and activists who cared and advocated for them.
Co-founder and Chair of the National HIV Story Trust Paul Coleman said "today is an extremely exciting - and significant - day for us and most importantly our 100+ interviewees. By making these interviews available to the public we are ensuring future generations can understand from first-hand accounts what it meant to be diagnosed with HIV in the 1980 and 1990s, the heartbreak so many experienced but also the truly incredible stories of love and compassion."
"I want to thank LMA for making these testimonies accessible to the public through their Mediatheque suite and look forward to even more of our interviews becoming available throughout the year."
“But above all we want to pay tribute to the bravery and honesty of the people who shared their stories with us. For many this was the first time they had revisited that period of their life and we are honoured they wanted to contribute to this project in this way - men, women, trans, gay, straight, all races… the archive captures the breadth of HIV.”
How to access the collection
The films are available to view in the Mediatheque space in our public rooms at LMA. The Mediatheque is our digital access point and has multiple terminals and headsets for visitors to access the interviews, and explore other oral histories, films, or digital documents in the wider LMA digital collection which are not available online. Each film available has been fully transcribed and subtitled allowing searching, both within the transcript of an individual interview, and across all the interviews in the collection, with over 40 hours of material in this first release.
All interviews being made available on the Mediatheque have undergone an extensive data protection and sensitivity review. Due to the sensitive subject matter of the interviews, they will only be able to view on-site. However, summaries of the available interviews can be found on our online catalogue.
The remaining interviews will be added to the Mediatheque by early 2023 and further development work on the interface will continue until then; including further improvement of the searchability and discoverability of the collection through the creation of a lexicon of keywords specific to the NHST collection.