Background Information about British Columbia's Tobacco Industry Documents

Document Information - each document on this web site includes a Document Information page which provides information about the documents in a number of fields. This page can be used to determine more information about the document, and assist in refining a search. In some cases, fields on the Document Information page will be empty - this indicates that the information is not available from the document. The following provides an explanation of the key fields:

• Title: The title of the document. Where the document does not have an obvious title, the title reads "None".
• Document Date: The date the document was produced. Some documents are not dated.
• Bates Number: The Document Information page includes the Bates Number for the first page of each document. This is a unique identifying number assigned by each producing party to each page of the tobacco industry documents as the documents were produced in litigation. These numbers can be used to search for documents. The name Bates Number comes from the Bates machine used to stamp numbers onto pages of documents.
• File Number: The number of the file where the document is housed in the Guildford or Minnesota Depository.
• Document Type: The type of document (eg: letter, memo, minutes of a meeting).
• Author: The individual who authored or signed the document.
• Addressee: The name of the person(s) to whom the document is addressed.
• Copyee: The name(s) of individuals copied on the document.
• Document Source: Identifies whether the document is from the Guildford or Minnesota Depository.

Guildford - Documents from British American Tobacco. Guildford is a depository of several million documents housed in Guildford, England. British Columbia's legal team has selected several thousand documents.

Minnesota - The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository was established by order of the trial judge as a result of a successful suit by the Attorney General of Minnesota and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota against the seven major American tobacco companies, settled in 1998. The Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository holds more than 27 million pages of documents, the world's largest hardcopy collection of tobacco industry documents. The collection is growing as the depository continues to receive documents produced in other tobacco litigation. According to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, the tobacco companies are to post these additional documents on their Web sites as well. B.C.'s legal team has retrieved approximately 1,000 documents from the Minnesota depository in support of its action against the tobacco industry and these documents have been posted here.

Not all of the documents housed in Guildford and Minnesota are available on this web site. Furthermore, there are a number of additional web sites publishing these documents. Depending on the selection process for each of these collections, some of the documents may be duplicates of those published on B.C.'s Tobacco Industry site. Other documents will be found exclusively on B.C.'s site, or exclusively on other document sites.

PDF Format

Some documents on this website are in PDF format and require a PDF reader. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader Version 7.0 or the most recent version of another PDF reader, you can download Adobe Acrobat Reader by selecting the 'Get Acrobat Reader' icon.