Collections
The Industry Documents Library is a digital archive of documents created by industries which influence public health, hosted by the University of California, San Francisco Library. Originally established in 2002 to house the millions of documents publicly disclosed in historic litigation against the tobacco industry in the 1990s - including the groundbreaking Minnesota settlement and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement - the Library has since expanded to include documents from the opioid, drug, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries to preserve open access to this information and to support research on the commercial determinants of public health.
Read more about the creation of the Industry Documents Library on our History page.
The mission of the UCSF Industry Documents Library is to identify, collect, curate, preserve, and make freely accessible internal documents created by industries and their partners which have an impact on public health, for the benefit and use of policymakers, researchers, clinicians, educators, students, and the general public at UCSF and internationally.
The UCSF Industry Documents Library seeks to advance health worldwide by serving as a freely accessible global information resource providing permanent access to documents which shed light on industry practices which impact public health.
The documents have been cited in more than 1,000 publications, including articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, NPR, and the New York Times. The Library makes its collections available for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research under the Fair Use provision of U.S. Copyright Law. For more information about using and citing the documents, please review our Copyright and Fair Use guidelines.
To learn more about how we collect documents, please read our Collection Development Policy.
If you are interested in contributing documents please contact Library staff.
For specifications on document disclosure in litigation, please see our report Technical Recommendations for Preserving Industry Documents Disclosed in Litigation (2021).
The Truth Tobacco Industry Documents collection was developed with a 2001 gift from the American Legacy Foundation (now Truth Initiative). The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive was created and funded in part through settlements of public interest lawsuits by states. All other collections are supported through grants and donations. To learn more please visit the specific About page for Tobacco, Opioid, Chemical, Drug, Food, or Fossil Fuel collections.
