AIDS Info BBS: Documents

AIDS Info BBS: Documents

This collection holds files recovered from archived versions of the AIDS Info BBS website, as archived by the Internet Archive. The AIDS Info BBS, as its name suggests, hosted a variety of different information, including copies of mainstream news stories, medical research, statistics, community periodicals, and message boards.

This collection holds files from four areas relevant to the QDHP, covering the late 1980s up to the early 2000s:

• "Caregivers" mailing list archive
• "Rethink" and "quilty" mailing lists archives
• Message archives for two BBS-based fora: "openforum" and "thisBBS"
• AIDS-related periodicals, including a complete archive of AIDS Treatment News issues

In total, the collection holds 12,496‬ files, collected in four .zip archives. While their original folder hierarchy on the AIDS Info BBS has been maintained, all files have been converted (if they weren't already) to plain text files (.txt) for ease of use. Message files are titled using the order in which they were posted (ie: 001, 002, 003). Some folders also contain "desc" files, which are brief descriptions of the folder's topic and/or contents.

However, not every message posted to the site was preserved by the Internet Archive, and such absences are reflected in these archives: while some folders contain many of the original files, others only contain one or two preserved messages. Furthermore, except for the "caregivers" mailing list, messages were not originally anonymized when posted to the AIDS Info BBS site, and have not been subsequently anonymized by the QDHP.

If you would like messages you wrote to be redacted and/or removed from any of these folders, please contact the curator at admin@queerdigital.com.