Background: This presentation examines a digital archives program to collect and describe opioid industry documents which are publicly released in litigation and preserve them for long-term public access and research. The program builds on a successful model to preserve tobacco industry documents, which since 2002 has supported over 1,000 publications about industry influence on health and led to groundbreaking change in national and global tobacco control laws and policies. The opioid industry and opioid epidemic are of widespread concern to health sciences librarians, as evidenced by education and public policy work by MLA, NLM, AAHSL, and other associations.
Description: The program brings together librarians, informationists, digital archivists, software developers, historians, and health scientists at multiple institutions, with the aim of developing a freely accessible digital archive of millions of opioid industry documents which can be used to learn from the opioid epidemic in order to improve and safeguard the public health. The archive currently includes over 3,300 opioid industry documents (over 131,000 pages) which can be cross searched with other collections of previously confidential materials from the tobacco, chemical, food, drug, and fossil fuel industries, including memos, reports, internal scientific studies, marketing and sales information, and public relations campaigns. These materials are used by scientists, journalists, lawyers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to investigate industry influence on public health. The program provides research and education services and also prepares data for digital health humanities and computational analysis projects.
Conclusion: This presentation will describe current program goals, metadata and digital preservation considerations, outreach, anticipated evaluation methods, and collaboration opportunities. Expected outcomes include: 1) public access to potentially tens of millions of opioid industry documents; 2) long-term digital preservation of industry documents; 3) increased support for scholarship on subjects including commercial determinants of health, pain management, addiction, conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, health policy, and digital health humanities.