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!
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We added 57,427 new documents to the collections in 2021 (38,927 tobacco, 11,523 drug, and 6,977 food)
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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!)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We hosted three incredible summer interns who worked remotely on metadata enhancement projects and helped us advance our work with natural language processing (NLP)
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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
Thursday, June 10, 2021
More Opioid, Tobacco and Food Industry Documents Online
Today, IDL staff added
1,266 new industry documents across 3 archives!
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.
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.
Friday, November 06, 2020
More Industry Documents and the 10th Annual Medical Heritage Library Conference
Drug Industry Documents Update:
563 new documents posted today:
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515 new National Prescription Opiate Litigation documents (Opioid MDL)
- 48 documents in our new Insys Litigation Documents collection - documents include 45 volumes of transcripts in the 2019 US vs. Kapoor, et al. lawsuit brought by the government after a grand jury found Insys, maker of Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain medication, guilty of charges including racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and bribery. Insys founder, Dr John Kapoor, and a number of executives, were found guilty and sentenced to jail time.
Tobacco Industry Documents Update:
76 new Tobacco Documents including DATTA and RJ Reynolds Records
More News:
Today is World Digital Preservation Day! Since last year's digital preservation celebration on November 7, 2019, the Industry Documents Library has added 152,445 new industry documents for preservation in our archives. #WDPD2020
Smoke on Screens: Audiovisual Evidence of the Tobacco Industry’s Harms to Public Health. Join the IDL team on 11/13 at 10:15am PST for our presentation at the 10th Annual Medical Heritage Library Conference! Registration is free; please sign up in advance.
Behind the scenes update:
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.
Thursday, October 08, 2020
New Tobacco and Drug Industry Documents Posted
Truth Tobacco Documents Update:
11,426 new Tobacco Industry Documents added to the Truth Tobacco collection today!
Most of these documents were unavailable and "confidential" until now - see the "formerly confidential" docs in this release.
Drug Documents Update:
We are excited to announce 2 new collections of opioid documents totaling over 2,100 documents:
- The National Prescription Opiate Litigation Documents is a collection of documents from the Federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) 2804 heard in the U.S. District Court in Cleveland, Ohio (Northern District of Ohio). Plaintiffs alleged that the manufacturers of prescription opioids grossly misrepresented the risks of long-term use and distributors failed to properly monitor suspicious orders of those prescription drugs--all of which contributed to the current opioid epidemic.
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The Kentucky Opioid Litigation Documents is a collection of documents from the lawsuit brought by the Commonwealth of Kentucky against Purdue Pharma, settled in 2015 for $24 Million, that alleged improper marketing of the drug OxyContin