The University of California at San Francisco and the American Legacy Foundation have posted more than 20 million (previously secret) internal tobacco industry documents online.

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library "offers integrated searching of tobacco industry documents previously released through disparate industry websites," according to its own site.

Documents included in the library come from the following tobacco industry sources:

• American Tobacco
• Brown and Williamson
• Council for Tobacco Research
• Lorillard
• Philip Morris
• RJ Reynolds
• Tobacco Institute

The "simple search" allows for keyword searching, while the "advanced search" allows for the addition of boolean connectors "AND," "OR" and "NOT." Additionally, an asterisk (*) may be used as a wildcard at the end of a word to search for plurals as well as singulars.

While the searches return the full text documents (in either the .PDF or .TIFF file formats), the searches comb through ONLY META-DATA – the descriptive indexing information created for tracking/classifying the documents during litigation.

A search for "smokeless AND cigarette" for example, yielded a total "over 1848 records" (although an exact number of matches was not noted). Down the left side of the results screen, the site features a breaks down of which of the seven tobacco industry sources where documents were found and the number of documents in each.

See also:

• Fifty Years of Internal Chemical Industry Documents Posted