Ending the HIV Epidemic: Equitable Access, Everyone’s Voice

A guest post by Amanda J. Wilson, Chief, Office of Engagement and Training; Leigh Samsel, NLM Planning and Evaluation Officer, Office of Strategic Initiatives; and Elizabeth A. Mullen, Manager of Web Development and Social Media, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

This year’s theme for World AIDS Day is Ending the HIV Epidemic: Equitable Access, Everyone’s Voice. As the world’s largest biomedical library, NLM has a long history of supporting NIH’s efforts to end the HIV epidemic by providing equitable access to trusted biomedical information, supporting biomedical research, and highlighting the historical, social, and cultural context of this research. Expedient, reliable, free public access to NLM’s trusted biomedical information resources and literature collections advances the knowledge and treatment of HIV/AIDS worldwide, helps progress research to end the HIV epidemic and improves the health of people living with HIV.

Improving HIV/AIDS Health Information Access

NLM integrates multiple types of HIV literature, sequence, testing, and clinical trials data into a portfolio of resources that enables researchers to easily find related information and robustly supports global research to end the HIV epidemic. Free public access to citations to the scholarly literature is provided through NLM’s PubMed and Bookshelf, while free access to full-text is provided through PubMed Central and NLM Digital Collections.  GenBank and the Sequence Read Archive allow researchers to deposit and access publicly available DNA sequences, including HIV experimental and clinical genome sequences. NCBI Virus makes HIV and other virus sequences from RefSeq, GenBank, and other NLM repositories available. The HIV-1 Human Interaction Database includes information gleaned from literature about the interaction between human and HIV-1 genes and proteins.

NLM also provides a rich resource of easy-to-understand online health and wellness information available in English and Spanish via MedlinePlus. Among its wealth of content, MedlinePlus contains several HIV/AIDS topical pages. NLM supports an equitable distribution of information by providing resources and support to strengthen skills and literacies needed to access and use biomedical information for those affected by HIV/AIDS. The Network of the National Library of Medicine provides free health information training, from webinars to instructor-led classes to on-demand tutorials. Additional trainings on a variety of topics are added weekly.

A Long History of Support

NLM’s engagement and collections activities strive to capture the many voices in and around the HIV epidemic. A key historical partnership for engagement with the NIH Office of AIDS Research was the HIV/AIDS Community Information Outreach Program; beginning in 1994 as a resource for community-based organizations to improve the knowledge, skills, and technical means to access and provide the latest authoritative prevention, treatment, and research information electronically. The current iteration of the program concludes this month with 200 plus organizations conducting more than 350  projects in 38 states providing training, communications campaigns, and enhanced products and apps to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS information and discoveries over the 40-year history.

NLM has been collecting publications and archival materials related to HIV/AIDS since the first Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on the topic was issued in June 1981. The NLM HIV/AIDS Web Archive offers more than 150 websites documenting the biomedical, clinical, cultural, and social aspects of HIV/AIDS in the early 21st century. This month you can look for new additions and resources.

World AIDS Day 2021

This month, to help mark World AIDS Day, NLM will launch a new online exhibition—A People’s History of Pandemic: AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health. The NLM exhibition will cover the archive of public health posters about AIDS rooted in the cultural output of artists, activists, and community workers. Their work, specifically the use of personal narrative as a visual-art strategy, along with language and the collective process of creating AIDS posters, continues to broadcast the message that, 40 years after the crisis began, attention to AIDS has not diminished. In mid-December, NLM’s Profiles in Science, will release a curated collection of digitized primary source materials related to the United States National Commission on AIDS, dating from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. Learn more about the diversity of NLM’s historical collections related to HIV/AIDS on Circulating Now.

As we mark this year’s World AIDS Day, NLM is proud to continue its efforts to provide global access to trusted resources; share the voices of those affected by HIV; and provide the foundation for researchers, clinicians, patients, and families to engage and answer the call to end the HIV epidemic.