UC San Francisco announced yesterday it would establish a permanent Internet archive of 40 million pages of once-secret tobacco industry documents and develop a research center for study of the material with a $15 million gift from the American Legacy Foundation.
The documents currently are scattered among a depository in Minnesota and six different Internet sites run by the various tobacco companies. The new online archive at UCSF will ensure that the documents remain in the public domain after 2010, when a 1998 settlement with 46 state attorneys general allows the tobacco industry to remove them from the Internet.
"Many of these documents have never seen the light of day and certainly not in such a wide way," said Karen Butter, UCSF's assistant vice chancellor for library services and instruction technology. She will direct the new Legacy National Tobacco Documents Library. "It really is a victory for everybody in the world, because it lets people know what the tobacco industry is up to, and it really forms the foundation of research."
The American Legacy Foundation, created in March 1999 as part of the settlement agreement and funded with $1.5 billion over 10 years, chose UCSF for the gift because the university has been at the forefront of the battle against big tobacco. The school has conducted millions of dollars of research into tobacco-related diseases and led efforts to make tobacco-related documents available for study on the Internet.
"What is exciting about this is that our board decided to fund something like this in perpetuity because it is so important to have it available forever," said Cheryl Healton, president and CEO of the American Legacy Foundation. "It is one of those things you don't want to forget."
The new archive, if available only on paper, would comprise more than 2.5 miles of boxes stacked five deep, a significant expansion of the 100,000 pages of documents UCSF has online now.
UCSF created its original digital tobacco library after 4,000 pages of secret industry documents with potentially damning data on tobacco industry practices were leaked in 1994 to Stanton Glantz, a UCSF Medical School and a leading tobacco industry critic.
The documents, delivered anonymously by a "Mr. Butts," a character in the Doonesbury comic strip, apparently came from the offices of lawyers representing Brown & Williamson, which makes the Kool, Viceroy, Raleigh and Richland brands, UCSF said.
The company sued UCSF to keep its papers private. But in June, the state Supreme Court refused to block their release, and UCSF posted them on the Internet.
The site -- www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/ -- receives 500,000 each month.
The UCSF library will serve as a national repository for tobacco industry documents and will allow public access to Legacy Foundation-funded studies, reports and other publications on tobacco- and health-related issues.
"The creation of this center will put a firm institutional base under these activities and create a focus on them that hasn't existed before," Glantz said.
The new site also will simplify use of the documents, and because some people worry the tobacco industry spies on visitors to the sites, all queries will be anonymous.
"We are going to be able to get all those documents together in an integrated fashion," said Butter, who first posted secret tobacco industry documents online in 1995 after a successful court fight with a tobacco company.
"You can do one search, and the documents will be reliable."
The new archive will offer a trove of information. It covers "almost any subject from the basic science of addiction to the most hellish business practices the industry could dredge up," Healton said.
The new research center, which will be headed by Glantz, will expand on the tobacco control research already under way by 18 faculty at UCSF by promoting further study of tobacco-related documents and training scholars in the field.
Glantz said the center also would play a key role in educating community groups on the tobacco industry's advertising practices and aggressive marketing to children and minority groups.
"People need to understand how to deal with that and how to counter it and how to ask the important questions, not just the easy ones," he said.
The $15 million award to UCSF is the largest ever by the American Legacy Foundation. It will come in the form of a $10 million endowment for the Internet library, a $2.5 million grant for the center and another $2.5 million for renovations at the library that will house the center.
Butter said it would be at least a year before the first documents would appear online because the library must organize and cross-reference them.
Under the 1998 settlement agreement, tobacco companies must release any other documents arising from subsequent litigation. Such materials also will be added to the archive.
E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com
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