Food Industry Documents Library

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Season’s Greetings from the UCSF Industry Documents Library

At the end of another challenging year, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all of our researchers for your continuing support and connection to the Industry Documents Library.

Here are some of the achievements we reached in 2021:
15,194,052 documents now available through IDL!

We added 57,427 new documents to the collections in 2021 (38,927 tobacco, 11,523 drug, and 6,977 food)
In collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, we officially launched the new Opioid Industry Documents Archive and began rapid work on collection development (more news coming soon!)
We worked with the Minnesota Historical Society to ensure that all documents in the tobacco companies' Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository and document websites are preserved, after the Depository closed to the public at the end of August 2021
We developed a set of Technical Recommendations for Preserving Industry Documents Disclosed in Litigation and made these publicly available for use by other librarians, archivists, and legal professionals engaged in document disclosure work
We processed and made public the British American Tobacco Africa Collection, an essential set of documents for investigating tobacco industry bribery and corruption in Africa
We delivered an eight-week Food Industry Documents Archive Training Institute to help global health advocates learn how to search and use industry documents in their work
We hosted three incredible summer interns who worked remotely on metadata enhancement projects and helped us advance our work with natural language processing (NLP)
We added 12 new publications which cite industry documents to our Bibliography

From all of us at the IDL, we wish you a safe and festive holiday season, and a healthy and hopeful New Year ahead.
Kate, Rachel, Rebecca and Sven

Friday, August 13, 2021

Industry Documents Update - August 2021

Tobacco Industry Documents
155 new documents were posted to TTID yesterday including:

1 American Tobacco Co record
1 Philip Morris record
55 RJ Reynolds records
98 DATTA documents (Depositions and Trial Transcripts from recent Engle Progeny cases)

Food Industry Documents
435 new documents posted to the USRTK Food Industry Collection - these materials largely contain communications between the Coca-Cola Company, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and other related scientists/academics regarding ISCOLE and obesity in children. More documents are forthcoming.

6 new documents added to the Roger Adams Papers - Sugar Research Foundation meeting minutes and research reports from the 1960s.

Technical Recommendations for Preserving Industry Documents Disclosed in Litigation
The IDL recently crafted the report Technical Recommendations for Preserving Industry Documents Disclosed in Litigation which is linked on our website under About/Overview. These recommendations come from two decades of experience collecting, preserving, and providing public access to industry documents disclosed in litigation, and offer recommendations on how to make these materials freely available in perpetuity and what costs should be included as part of settlements or judgements.

Thursday, June 10, 2021

More Opioid, Tobacco and Food Industry Documents Online

Today, IDL staff added 1,266 new industry documents across 3 archives!

163 RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris Records
1,088 Insys Litigation Documents concerning the Insys physician speaker programs in 2014/2015.
15 videos from the Fredrick Stare Papers - these videos are a mix of industry-funded educational films about meat and carbohydrates; videos for the medical community on heart disease and balanced nutrition in America; and a set of videos from the now-defunct 'United Sciences of America' (USA) which used science and celebrities to endorse their supplements and meal replacement products.

Thursday, May 13, 2021

12K New Industry Documents Posted including New Internal Insys Opioid Documents

11,953 new documents were added to IDL today!

Included in this new posting:

4,809 Tobacco Industry Documents from RJ Reynolds, Philip Morris and Brown and Williamson files
5,691 new Food Industry Documents from the USRTK Food Collection. The majority of these documents concern Coca-Cola partnerships with academic institutions and researchers on issues of obesity and exercise.
1,453 Insys Therapeutics internal documents. This Insys Litigation Documents collection is being processed and posted over the course of the year (yes its a big collection!). The documents come from U.S. District Court records (District of Massachusetts, Boston) and from investigation by the New York State Office of the Attorney General.
In 2016, former executives and managers of Insys Therapeutics Inc. (an opioid manufacturer which produced Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain medication) were indicted by a Grand Jury on charges including conspiracy to commit racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback law in relation to a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners and defraud insurers.

Thursday, April 15, 2021

New Food and Tobacco Industry Documents Posted

869 new documents have been posted to the Industry Documents Library today!

This includes:

A final batch of 830 documents added to the Stare Papers collection in our Food Industry Documents Archive
39 new Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds Records added to the Tobacco Industry Documents

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

UCSF and Johns Hopkins University Launch Opioid Industry Documents Archive

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Johns Hopkins University announced the launch of the Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a digital repository of publicly disclosed documents from recent judgments, settlements, and ongoing lawsuits concerning the opioid crisis. The documents come from government litigation against pharmaceutical companies, including opioid manufacturers and distributors related to their contributions to the deadly epidemic, as well as litigation taking place in federal court on behalf of thousands of cities and counties in the United States. The documents in the archive include emails, memos, presentations, sales reports, budgets, audit reports, Drug Enforcement Administration briefings, meeting agendas and minutes, expert witness reports, and depositions of drug company executives.

The Opioid Industry Documents Archive leverages extraordinary expertise within UCSF and Johns Hopkins University in library science, information technology, and digital archiving. It also relies on scholarship focused on many dimensions of the opioid epidemic, ranging from the history of medicine to pharmaceutical policy to clinical care. Key organizations at UCSF involved include the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies; Department of Clinical Pharmacy; Department of Humanities and Social Sciences; Department of Family and Community Medicine; and Library. From Johns Hopkins University, the project involves the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness; Welch Medical Library; Institute of the History of Medicine; and Sheridan Libraries’ Digital Research and Curation Center.

The new archive will provide free public access to anyone who is interested in investigating the activities that have led to the devastating epidemic, which has now contributed to the deaths of nearly 500,000 people. The archive will promptly include new documents as they become available through resolution of legal action against companies that contributed to the deadly opioid crisis. The launch coincides with the universities’ efforts to house more than 250,000 documents produced by opioid manufacturer Insys in the course of its bankruptcy proceedings following opioid litigation.

The archive is similar to the groundbreaking Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive at UCSF, which has fostered scientific and public health discoveries shaping tobacco policy in the U.S. and around the world. This new archive from two top research universities will deliver a wealth of information that experts can analyze to help policymakers prevent another disaster like this from happening again.

To learn more, read the full press release or contact us.

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Formerly Confidential RJ Reynolds Documents Posted

Tobacco Industry Documents update
For our last documents update for 2020 we uploaded over 10,000 tobacco industry documents:

10,582 RJ Reynolds Records - most of these were previously confidential or privileged documents.
85 Philip Morris Records

Food Industry Documents update
2 new BC Sugar Company documents were added today containing 1978-1979 Sugar Association Board Meeting materials

Documents Research update
We added four papers and publications to the IDL Bibliography recently. Links to text as well as industry documents used in the research available on the bibliography page:

van der Eijk Y, Tan GPP. Tobacco industry targeting of health-conscious youth with 'lighter' cigarettes: the case of Singapore. Tobacco Control 2020 Oct.
Jureidini J, McHenry LB. The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research. Wakefield Press, 2020.
Mathew M, Karazas D, Manmatha R and Jawahar CV. DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images. 2020 July.
Qian ZJ, Hill MJ, Ramamurthi D and Jackler RK. Promoting Tobacco Use Among Students: The U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company College Marketing Program. The Laryngoscope, 2020 Oct.

Behind the scenes update: Reminder: We are upgrading from Solr5.5.1 to Solr8.5.1 to bring our index to the latest generation of search technology. While most of the improvements are in the background making our index more efficient, our users can expect improved sorting, faceting, and relevance ranking. Please let us know if you experience something in your search you did not expect.