Internship update - our Wellcome Trust funded HIV/AIDS Project

In this week's blog post, current LHSA intern Stephen talks about his experiences while working on our Wellcome Trust funded project, 'Policies, Postcards and Prophylactics: a project to catalogue and conserve LHSA'S UNESCO-awarded HIV/AIDS Collections (1983-2010).

As an intern with LHSA I started to work with the HIV/AIDS collections two weeks ago. I have been involved in a variety of projects. Firstly, I attended a meeting on SCRAN, a Scottish image resource website where LHSA will soon be posting new photographs. SCRAN is a wonderful tool for teachers and pupils because of the breadth of subjects covered. Images can be used for teaching/studying purposes and institutions can create their own educational resources on specific topics, such as a lesson on the First World War. 

One of the "Take Care" Campaign images will will be used on the SCRAN website

Secondly, LHSA aims to use the rich and varied HIV/AIDS collections (particularly its images) to design an educational website, and I have taken part in that project. The resources will match the criteria set by the Scottish Curriculum of Excellence in the Health and Wellbeing or Expressive Arts areas so I have been involved in producing ideas and some draft resources.

 

Another of the images which will soon appear on SCRAN (GD22)

Thirdly, I have participated in several outreach projects, posting on Flickr and Facebook. On Flickr I have expanded our selection of albums of pictures of condoms, condom cases, posters, pins, badges, balloons, watches, t-shirts etc. Every item that could be printed on was used to inform the public on the dangers of HIV/AIDS. On Facebook and Twitter I have been posting images of the items I have found most interesting every day for a week.

To finish with I have been in charge of listing the items in a collection we have referenced as GD22, which corresponds to the Take Care Campaign collection. Box listing consists of a rapid listing of items in order to prepare the collection for arrangement and cataloguing. GD22 is an interesting collection to be working on because it contains many of the promotional objects designed for the campaign.