July 17, 2001:
The UCSF Tobacco Control Archives has released 4,000 more documents of the British-American Tobacco Document Collection, bringing the total of searchable documents to 6,000. This is the fourth collection of tobacco documents to be made available online by the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California San Francisco. The full-text searchable collection can be accessed at -
First mounted in February 2001, this collection will be added to over the next year.
The British-American Tobacco Document Collection represents a subset of over 8 million pages produced by the British-American Tobacco Company (BATCo) and now held at the Guildford Document Depository in Guildford, England. The documents were obtained through the legal discovery process for a successful suit against the major tobacco companies by the Attorney General of Minnesota and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota. The suit was settled in 1998.
Health Canada, Physicians for Smokefree Canada, the Ministry of the Attorney General of British Columbia, the World Health Organization, and individual researchers uncovered the documents through investigations at the Guildford Document Depository. This new collection was funded by the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. UCSF Library Tobacco Control Archives staff add thesaurus terms and other indexing information to the records. In addition, the full-text of the documents can also be searched at the UCSF site, an asset unique to this collection.
Ranging in date from the 1950s to the 1990s, the documents cover subject matter such as marketing, research and development, cigarette analysis and design, and establishing business in developing countries. The documents reveal how BATCo's efforts to develop new, "safer" cigarettes (products with fewer biological effects) evolve into efforts to convince consumers that certain existing cigarettes, such as low-tar varieties, are safer.
Established in 1994, the Tobacco Control Archives (TCA) provides a centralized source of information about the tobacco control movement and resulting legislation. Sponsored by the UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management, the TCA collects, preserves, and provides access to papers, unpublished documents, and electronic resources. Highlights include the Brown & Williamson Collectionthe first tobacco industry documents to be released on the Internetand documentation of the lawsuit challenging the Joe Camel ad campaign.