Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

Description

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) currently contains over 7 million documents relating to the advertising, marketing, manufacturing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco products. In accordance with a 1999 settlement, tobacco companies have been required to open and maintain a Website which provides public access to all company documents produced in smoking-related lawsuits and in future civil actions involving smoking and health cases. LTDL is comprised of two collections from the University of California, San Francisco Tobacco Control Archives plus internal documents from top tobacco industries.

• Internal tobacco industry documents
• Tobacco Institute
• Council for Tobacco Research Documents
• RJ Reynolds
• Philip Morris
• American Tobacco
• Brown & Williamson
• Lorillard
• Collections from the Tobacco Control Archives at UCSF:
• Mangini ("Joe Camel")
• UCSF Brown & Williamson
• Tobacco DATTA: Depositions and Trial Testimony Archive

The LTDL offers integrated searching of tobacco industry documents previously released through disparate industry websites which are slated to cease in 2010. Through support of the American Legacy Foundation, the LTDL will maintain this data through a permanent, stable interface. New documents added monthly as they are collected from industry sites

Women's Studies Content

There are literally thousands of documents that pertain to the tobacco-related health effects on women and children, marketing targeted to females, gender roles, and media images of women. Popular Documents: Marketing to Women is an easily accessible overview of the types of materials for women's studies that may be found in Legacy Tobacco. Tobacco companies engaged in extensive research on women in order to develop products, marketing, and advertising and track changing roles and preferences of women. An interesting 1973 report divides women into eight categories, from "bra-burning extremists" to "anti-libbers."

All of the Multimedia Collection (680 video and audio tapes) eventually will be digitized and made available through the Internet Archive. A search of the collection shows there are audio tapes of female focus groups discussing their smoking habits and reactions to cigarette advertisements as well as recordings of interviews about research on the health effects of smoking. Videos include cigarette commercials. Some videos are available for viewing in the UCSF Tobacco Industry Videos Collection at the Internet Archive. Others will be added, and it's possible to request that an item in the Multimedia Collection be uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Searching

Legacy Tobacco allows searching individual collections, a combination of collections, or all nine collections simultaneously. Fields searchable in all collections include the obvious such as Author and Title as well as fields that are unique to LTDL, for example"copied" (names of individuals and/or organizations copied on the document) and "characteristics" (description of the properties of the document such as Attachments Missing, Handwritten, Illegible). Many other Search Fields are available and vary according to collection. There is a beginner and advanced tutorial as well as extensive help topics.

Each document in Legacy Tobacco has a corresponding index record created by the tobacco industry. Since the inception of the database in 2002, users have been able to search metadata (title, author, date) associated with the index record but not the documents themselves. With funding from the National Cancer Institute, the Library's Center for Knowledge Management began in 2004 to create searchable PDF documents, making the full text of the documents searchable through a basic interface. See Legacy Tobacco Library Documents Full Text Demonstration.The next phase involves creating a full-featured research site.

Truncation	yes (*)
Boolean	yes (AND, NOT, OR)
Phrase Searching	no
Help Screens/Quality	yes/extensive
Controlled Vocabulary	no
Keywords in Context	yes

Archive Review:
Marcia Barrett
The University of Alabama