Archival holdings available for research of all kinds in the UK are among the most rich and extensive in the world. The wealth of these collections is shown in British Archives which contains details of the material held by more than 1,000 archive repositories, libraries, institutions and societies. However, this is not exhaustive. There is more material to be discovered and records are being created continually.

The AIDS Social History Programme, based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and financed by Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, has been engaged, since 1988, upon researching and writing the social history of AIDS in the UK. The work is concentrating on official policy making in the context of the various influences upon it from the statutory and voluntary sectors, the medical establishment and medical research. An initial aim of the Programme was to establish an AIDS archive. However, before any decisions could be made about taking in material it was desirable to investigate the records being generated by those individuals and organisations involved in the AIDS arena. As an initial phase, a pilot survey was established, in January 1990, as a four-month project to identify the extent and scope of primary documentation for the history of AIDS in the UK.

Surveys of primary source material are not new.