Special collection digital open archive pioneers: The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library @ UCSF
From the transcript of the 2007 Medical Library Association awards luncheon presentation on May 21, 2007 ( I added the hypertext links and emphasis):
“The Thomson Scientific/Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award is sponsored by Thomson Scientific and recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of technology to the delivery of health sciences information, to the science of information, or to the facilitation of the delivery of health sciences information. The 2007 award was presented to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library project. Karen Butter, AHIP, accepted the award on behalf of the group that was instrumental in the development of the online library: Ms. Butter, Heidi Schmidt, Robert Mason, Kirsten Neilsen, Albert Jew, and Stanton Glantz. This project, located at the University of California– San Francisco, is an online multimedia database of tobacco industry documents that resulted from the 1998 master settlement agreement between the attorneys general of most states and major US tobacco corporations. The library comprises more than seven million tobacco documents related to the tobacco industry and serves as a model for an open access digital repository library. The development team created a pioneering and complex search method to allow searching across the entire collection and to accommodate the extensive growth of the collection. It has an automated routine to continually update and incorporate relevant new documents into the collection. As one letter of recommendation mentions, “the Legacy Library shows the power of libraries to make information available on a global scale with broad impact.”
As of today, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) contains more than 11 million documents (60+ million pages) created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities.
