New AIDS History Project Collections Online

Materials newly digitized as part of our NEH grant-funded project The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic are available online on Calisphere.

Most of theses collections represent a “mass digitization” approach to putting materials online. In most cases (Ephemera Collection excepted), the collections are scanned at the folder level. The objects on Calisphere correspond to the folder titles you see in the collection guides found on the Online Archive of California. 

These objects contain a multi-page pdf of all the papers in each folder. Click the image to download a keyword-searchable pdf.

In some cases, when a folder title actually refers to a group of several folders, you’ll see multiple images (one for each folder) in a carousel below the main image, such as People vs. Owen Bathhouse Closure Records, Sex Clubs-Bathhouses Subject Files.

These collections are ready to research, plenty more on the way.

Bobbi Campell Diary

AIDS History Project Ephemera Collection

ACT-UP Golden Gate

People vs. Owen Bathhouse Closure (San Francisco Public Library)

Barbara Cameron Papers (San Francisco Public Library)

AIDS Treatment News Digital Collection

We’re announcing the publication of the AIDS Treatment News (ATN) digital collection.

The collection includes a sampling of the ATN records that we house at UCSF. ATN is a publication created by John S. James that investigates and reports on both conventional and experimental treatments for HIV/AIDS and related social and political issues. It began publication in 1986.

This collection is made possible through the generous support of an NHPRC grant from the National Archives.

The digital collection includes ephemera, photographs, and documents that illustrate AIDS-related activism and ATN’s operations.

Notable material includes images of the 1988 protest at the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) offices in Washington, DC, flyers related to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, and ACT UP San Francisco material.

View the complete digital collection on Calisphere. Contact us to visit the reading room and work with the ATN records.

Web-Archiving at UCSF: now with Request to Capture

As you may remember, we’ve been going through the process of revamping our web-archives collections and services, and have been posting some updates as we go along. As we’ve written about on here before, in the Archives we periodically crawl and save copies of UCSF websites to document the institutional history and changing and developing public face of the University.

If you spend much time attempting to save and document websites, you quickly learn that things on the web change A LOT, and they change quickly — a lot more quickly than you might think, in fact. The average life of a website is only 100 days. Here in the Archives, we feel this most clearly as the speed with which our “URL Seed List” (the list of sites we’re archiving) becomes out of date, and does not include important new campus websites.

We’re in the middle of an ongoing project to try to better address these gaps in our collecting by manually updating our lists to reflect more centralized UCSF IT record-keeping, and by coordinating our efforts with the UCSF IT and Web-Governance groups to make sure we get at least one good copy of sites that are at “end of life.” But there’s more to this too, if you’re a member of the UCSF community then we want to hear from YOU about what sites we should be collecting.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a new section to our website where UCSF affiliates can submit a request to have their site captured and added to the archive, and/or have the url added to our seed list for ongoing capture. Just as with the physical archives, our collection is curated, so we cannot guarantee selection of your site for capture, but regardless we want to encourage you to submit far and wide!

We know there are many important UCSF-affiliated websites that we’re not currently capturing, and so we’d love to expand our collections to better reflect the rich institutional life of this dynamic and diverse community of researchers and clinical practitioners. So if you’re in charge of a website that we should be capturing, submit a request to us today!

Submit requests here: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/ucsf/web/

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Tobacco Industry Sponsorship of the Olympics: A Dive into the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents

This post highlights just a few of the over 14 million tobacco industry documents contained in the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, a division of the UCSF Archives.

Could a sporting event like the Olympics ever equate with smoking? The games summon images of stamina, health, fortitude and strength, and for decades, the tobacco industry worked diligently to affiliate themselves with this major sporting event. Olympic games draw millions of eyes and the promotion and marketing opportunities were gold for the tobacco companies.

In 1936, RJ Reynolds’ Camel brand used Olympic speed skater Kit Klein to advertise the purported health effects of smoking on digestion:

Since 1988, each Olympic Games has adopted a tobacco-free policy but the tobacco industry has continued to create indirect associations in an effort to be connected with not only Olympic ideals but the worldwide platform the Games provide.

The Olympics as a powerful promotional tool: A 1980s memo in our British American Tobacco (BAT) records indicates executives considered the Olympics second only to Formula One motor racing as an effective sports-based “marketing platform.”  Into the 1990s, BAT affiliate UZBAT proudly proclaimed BAT sponsorship of Lina Cheryazova, 1994 Olympic Gold Medalist in freestyle skiing; and a 1992 memo between BAT and Singapore Tobacco Company, Korea, notes proposed Olympic team sponsorship in Thailand is illegal but ‘primary’ sponsors have been used as cover in the past.

The tobacco companies were so heavily invested in advertising and marketing around sporting events they could not risk censure from athletes. In a 1988 statement by Greg Louganis regarding tobacco sponsorship, the Olympian confessed, “I had become a slave to a tobacco company…Philip Morris representatives made it very clear that if I continued to speak out nationally [about tobacco and health], my career at, and association, with Mission Viejo [Realty Group, a PM subsidiary] would be over.”

The 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, Atlanta, Georgia:
Documents in our Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds collections demonstrate that despite the almost decade long tobacco-free policy of the Olympic Games, the companies were still planning promotions and marketing events. A 1996 Philip Morris memo shows the tobacco giant crafted a contract to place a Benson & Hedges ad on the back cover of the Ultimate Games Guide, a souvenir program of the 1996 Olympic Basketball games in Atlanta. Similarly, a 1995 RJ Reynolds email discusses a new tobacco company whose products could be introduced at the Games with catchy brands like Torch and Gold Medal, even going so far as to posit an “official cigarette of the 1996 Olympics.”

The “accommodation” of Olympic visitors who smoke was a hot topic in 1996 and one that allowed the companies to roll in promotional and marketing activities.  “Accommodation programs” were the tobacco industry’s way of holding off smoking bans by partnering with hospitality agencies (hotels and restaurants) to promote “choice”, “preference” and often the “solution” of improved ventilation in order to accommodate both smokers and non-smokers in public areas.

You can view these documents and millions more at the UCSF Industry Documents Library, where we collect and make available internal corporate documents produced by industries that distort science in an effort to influence policies meant to protect public health.