The Guildford Depository located near London, England houses an estimated 6-7 million pages
of internal corporate documents related to British American Tobacco Company (BATCo)
and its parent, BAT Industries plc. The depository was established as a result
of litigation brought against several tobacco companies by the State of Minnesota
and Minnesota Blue Cross Blue Shield. As a result of this legislation, an
estimated 1 million documents recently produced by British American Tobacco have been placed in the Minnesota Depository in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The vast majority of documents produced by BAT in litigation were only available at the Guildford Depository. Researchers had to travel to the depository to search the collection and were subject to the difficult conditions of access imposed by BAT, including use of a rudimentary and wholly inadequate index (see Muggli, et al., Big Tobacco is watching, Collin, et al., Unlocking the corporate documents of British American Tobacco, Glantz, The truth about Big Tobacco in its own words). Documents located in Minnesota were equally remote for most researchers. By scanning, indexing, and hosting the documents on this Web site, anyone with access to the Internet can now search and use them.
As of July 2008, the BAT documents were integrated into the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL). For your convenience, any query you enter here will return results from the BAT document collection within LTDL. In LTDL you can expand your search to include other U.S. companies in addition to all BAT documents.
Please note: A number of BATDA field codes have been modified in order to provide a uniform search syntax for the merged BATDA and LTDL documents. Before conducting a fielded search query, please consult the Expanded Search Fields page to see what has changed.
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