Thursday, December 06, 2007TOBACCO

We've Reached 8 Million Documents!

We released a new version of LTDL today which contains document additions and new features. The following additions bring the total to 8,006,384 documents!

Document Additions

-103,494 new Philip Morris documents
-18,040 new Tobacco Institute documents provided by Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI). Please note some of the document dates in the metadata may be inaccurate.
-593 new DATTA transcripts

New Features

Next/previous Bates:
Now, when you view a document's record (either from the pURL page or the search results), you will notice arrows before and after the document's bates number(s). Clicking on the arrows allows you to “page” to the previous or next Bates number in that collection.

For those already familiar with this feature in BATDA, this is useful for exploring the documents that surround a particular document or may have been attached at one time. Please note, Bates numbers are only valid within a collection - for instance, the very last bates number in the Philip Morris collection would not have a "next" bates.

E-mailing Bookbag:
Users are now able to email their bookbag to more than one email address.
To do this, Enter 2 or more email addresses in the "To" field, separated by commas.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007TOBACCO

Tobacco Advertising Exhibit at UCSF

The University of California, San Francisco’s Library and Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education are hosting “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Tobacco Industry’s Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking.” This exhibit of historic cigarette advertising and promotional items was curated by Laurie Jackler and Robert Jackler and Robert Proctor, two Stanford University experts on the tobacco industry’s marketing of their disease-causing products.

The exhibit shows --principally through advertising images-- how, between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often patently false claims in an effort to reassure the public of the safety of their products. Images of physicians were frequently used to sell cigarettes: Doctors were depicted as satisfied and enthusiastic partakers of the smoking habit. Images of medical men (and a few token women) appeared under soothing reassurances of the safety of smoking. Liberal use was also made of pseudo-scientific medical reports and surveys.

The exhibit will run through February 29 at the UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus Avenue, Fifth Floor, San Francisco. The Library is open M-Th 7:45 AM – Midnight; Fri 7:45 AM - 8:00 PM; Sat 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM; and Sun 10:00 AM - Midnight

An online version of the exhibit can be seen at http://tobacco.stanford.edu

Thursday, November 08, 2007TOBACCO

Documents Added, New Features and Fixes

An updated version of LTDL was released today containing new documents as well as some new features and fixes.

Additions to the UCSF Tobacco Industry Videos Collection at Internet Archive:
Twenty seven (27) tapes from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute collection, which contains videos from the Tobacco Institute and Council for Tobacco Research, have been uploaded to the UCSF Tobacco Industry Videos collection on Internet Archive (IA). These are available for immediate viewing or downloading. To find these available videos, search LTDL for records that have “RPCI” in the “special collection” field and “IA” in the “access” field (Example - speccoll:rpci access:IA)

The UCSF Tobacco Industry Videos collection now contains more than 500 items. If you have questions or need additional information please contact Polina Ilieva, Project Archivist at (415) 476-1024 or by e-mail - polina.ilieva(at)library.ucsf.edu


Document Additions to LTDL:
-219,906 new Philip Morris documents have been added to LTDL. The vast majority of these are from Barbara Schwab, et al. v. Philip Morris USA Inc., et al.

-2164 RJ Reynolds documents have also been added.


New Popular Documents section: California's Tobacco Propositions
The UCSF Library's Tobacco Control Archives previously contained a selected documents collection known as the "California Documents from the State of Minnesota Depository." This special collection has been has been modified and moved to the Popular Documents section of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.

A companion to "Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles" by Stan Glantz and Edith Balbach, this research collection provides insight into industry plans to fight local smoking initiatives, weaken enforcement of and support for California's 1995 smoke-free workplace legislation, and undermine California's tobacco control program.

Dates are more "readable" in document records:
While the date fields in each document are still in the YYYMMDD format, we have added an additional format of "Month Day, Year" (for example, October 15, 2000) for each date field where there is a full date available. We hope this will help users scan the results when looking for documents with specific dates.

Users are now able to exclude "file folders" from a search:
This exclusion is done by default in the Basic and Advanced Search screens. In the Expert Search screen, users will now have a check box to "exclude folders". This exclusion only applies to documents that have "folder" or "tab" in the Document Type (dt:) field and are 1 page in length. If you want to include folders in your search, simply uncheck the box.

MSA Collection choice:
In the collections box on the search screens, users could previously choose "all", to search all collections, or "none" to clear the boxes for individual selection. Users now have the option to choose “MSA” in all three search screens. This will select just the seven Master Settlement collections (PM, RJR, Lorillard, B&W, AT, TI and CTR).

As always, we value your input on these new features and fixes! Please contact us with any feedback, problems, or praises.

Thursday, October 11, 2007TOBACCO

New DOJ Collection and New Features

An updated version of LTDL has been put into production today with a new special collection as well as help for RefWorks and a new format for PDF links:

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library has added the "US Department of Justice" collection:
The United States Department of Justice collection is a special collection of documents that defendants in United States v. Philip
Morris, et al. initially withheld from production to the United States on grounds of privilege or other protection but were since deemed releasable.
This collection includes both voluntarily-produced documents and documents produced subject to court compulsion.

To search this special collection, do a fielded search for the term justice in the special collection field - speccoll:justice

For more information on this collection please consult our page - About the Collections.

Help for RefWorks and tobacco documents:
RefWorks is a web-based bibliographic management application similar to EndNote. Because it is web-based, you are able to access
and share your RefWorks personal citation database from anywhere via the Internet -- on campus, at home (via VPN), or abroad.

The Library at UCSF has acquired a site license for RefWorks and an account is free for UCSF students, faculty, and staff.
We have created a set of full instructions on how to format tobacco document citations using RefWorks - please access the RefWorks help page for more information.

Permanent link to PDF of a document:
Users have found it beneficial to bookmark the actual PDF of a document (not just the pURL record) so we have created a permanent link format for PDFs. Notice the notation /pdf follows after the original pURL format --
ex: "http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/vpq85d00/pdf"

This should help to standardize the links and guard against any broken links to documents.

Document Additions:
In addition to a new release of LTDL, we have added over 13,000 new documents to the British American Tobacco Documents Archive (BATDA) bringing the total to 6,642,841 pages in 1,428,269 documents.

Please contact us with any questions or problems - we always look forward to hearing about how these new collections and features work for you!

Tuesday, September 18, 2007TOBACCO

New Documents on BATDA

We have recently added thousands of new documents to the British American Tobacco Documents Archive (BATDA). As of September 18, 2007, BATDA now contains 6,545,399 pages in 1,415,146 documents - http://bat.library.ucsf.edu.

Thursday, September 13, 2007TOBACCO

Tobacco Control Fellowships for 2008

The UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) invites applications for fellowships in policy relevant tobacco control research. Completed applications are due January 31, 2008, for fellowships beginning July 1, 2008.

Applicants may learn more about the Center, the fellowship program, and review the list of UCSF faculty and their research interests at: http://tobacco.ucsf.edu.

For more information or to request an application, contact:
Nathan Sinclair
Program Assistant
Phone: 415-476-0140
Fax: 415-514-9345
Email: nathan.sinclair(at)ucsf.edu

Completed applications should be sent to:
Pamela Ling, MD, MPH
Fellowship Program Director, CTCRE
UCSF Box 1390
530 Parnassus Ave., #366
San Francisco, CA 94143-1390

Monday, September 10, 2007TOBACCO

New Features and Fixes

Welcome to the new LTDL News & Announcements Blog:
We have switched to a blog format that not only allows comments on each post but also allows you to subscribe to updates by RSS feed or by email. We hope to use this blog to better inform users regarding library additions, features, site maintenance and workshops. Subscribe today using the "Subscribe to this Page" links on the right hand side.

Phrase Searches include stop words:
It is now possible to search the document text for an exact phrase even if it includes those commonly used words (“stop words”) such as “it”, “the”, “a” and “and” that formerly were excluded from searches. Please note - in order for this to function properly, make sure the phrase you are searching for is enclosed in quotes (“ “).

Every document in LTDL now available as a PDF:
All of the records now contain PDFs but please note - currently, about 5,000 of these are non-searchable PDFs, meaning that once you open the document as a PDF, you cannot search for terms within the PDF text itself. We are committed to making every PDF searchable so look for updates on this feature.

Faster Searches:
Changes to the LTDL index have resulted in searches roughly 3X faster than before!

Fuzzy Searching:
We have upgraded the fuzzy search feature which finds words that are "close" in spelling to the search term (i.e. “coumarin~” finds coumadin, coumerin, coumaric, etc. ) This is especially helpful when searching text that has been OCR’ed.
See the LTDL Search Help for more information on fuzzy searching.

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