Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Nowadays I work at the University of California San Francisco in the Library. Specifically I am a document indexer for the Tobacco Control Digital Collections. What I do is review internal documents from the tobacco industry and assign metadata to them so that they can be searched in more diverse ways than simply by keyword. In other words, I log information such as Author, Title, People Mentioned, Companies Mentioned, and so forth. It's a good cause and of course I see some scandulous and fascinating documents flit across my computer screen. Another part of the library's tobacco-related holdings is the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL). This is a massive collection of millions of documents which are available due to the settlement of that big lawsuit against the tobacco industry.
If you are interested in this subject this a powerful resource. But even if you don't particularly consider yourself a Tobacco Control Activist, you may be interested in browsing our "Popular Documents" page, which tends to feature a few particularly scandulous examples of the tobacco industry's internal dialogue. Like the proposal for Fat Boys brand cigarettes aimed at "the inner-city Black smoker", or "Plans for positive exposure in women's magazines"



No comments: