ANN ARBOR—In more than two decades of covering HIV and AIDS, prolific science writer Jon Cohen has amassed one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of literature on the disease, amounting to some 230,000 pages of records.

A $150,000 grant from the John D. Evans Foundation will enable researchers at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and University Library to digitize this archive and make it accessible to researchers online.

“This material is important to preserve because it presents the most comprehensive history of the AIDS epidemic and captures the story of an era that is being lost as researchers move on to other projects,” said Gary Olson, the Paul M. Fitts Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the School of Information and head of the project team.

Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus as the cause of AIDS, points out that Cohen “wrote about much of the epidemic almost from the identification of the disease in 1981.” Cohen wrote for the Journal Science.

“The John D. Evans Foundation helps preserve the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic by funding Dr. Olson and his colleagues,” said Gallo, director of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland. He said that the digitization project will ensure that the Cohen archive “will be forever valuable to future generations of researchers and to the public at large.”

U-M President Mary Sue Coleman said: “The University has long been a leader in digitization, and this support from the John D. Evans Foundation allows us to expand our work and share these remarkable materials with the public.”

The Cohen archive holds extensive government transcripts of meetings and investigative reports?many obtained via the Freedom of Information Act?obscure documents on the epidemic from every affected region of the world, literature from AIDS vaccine and drug makers, proceedings of most major international AIDS conferences, and many reports from activists and nongovernmental organizations.

The core project team includes Olson, Perry Willett, who heads the U-M Library’s Digital Library Production Service, and associate professor Elizabeth Yakel of the School of Information, who is an expert on digital archives and on the usability and usefulness of finding aids. Dharma Akmon, a 2005 School of Information graduate, will be working on the project as a full-time intern.

Other major aspects of the project include assessing the intellectual property status of the material and developing metadata that will help future researchers find their way through it. Work on collecting and sorting the archive to prepare it for digitization is set to begin this summer.