Frequently Asked Questions

Who produces TDS Australasia?
TDS Australasia is produced by the document Research Team at the University of Sydney and is a bibliographic database currently in development for tobacco industry internal documents that concern Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines and Thailand. The TDS database is a product of projects funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute.

In July 2004, the database was expanded to provide access to other materials relevant to smoking and health that will be useful in assembling a critical history of the tobacco industry's conduct in Australasia.

Is the system comprehensive?
TDS Australasia is a specialised subset of industry documents with the aim of providing access to all of the most useful Australasian tobacco industry documents by September 2005. The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and Tobacco Documents Online are the leading comprehensive secondary collections of industry documents.

New materials being included from non industry sources will continually be added until the end of 2005. Please contact us if you have materials that you would like added to the database.

What information is included in the database?
TDS Australasia provides:

• brief bibliographic information such as title, date, author and bates numbers (for industry documents), value-added with a summary (interpretive information), keywords, country names, a document rating; and
  
  
• source images of tobacco industry correspondence and in most cases for other materials from non industry sources.

The industry document information is based on documents from the files of Philip Morris Incorporated, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Brown & Williamson, the American Tobacco Company, Lorillard Tobacco Company, The Council for Tobacco Research--U.S.A., Inc., British American Tobacco and The Tobacco Institute, Inc.

There are some circumstances where images are not available and in these circumstances the VIEW FILE option is not shown.

Are all documents in the Minnesota depositories indexed?
There are many duplicate documents in the Minnesota and Guildford depositories. It is not uncommon to find dozens of examples of the same document when searching. Although these documents are unique in the fact that they were found in different offices, in most circumstances we have indexed only one example of each relevant document. This means that the identifying Bates number on such documents will sometimes be different to other examples with the same author, title and date that may have been selected by other research projects. Researchers are advised to therefore be aware that many identical documents have different Bates numbers, caused by them being scanned in from different files within the tobacco industry, where many documents were multi-copied among employees.

How can I view the industry document images?
Documents in the TDS database are in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). In order to view PDF files, you will need to have the Adobe Acrobat Reader software installed on your computer. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free program provided by Adobe. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader you can download Adobe Acrobat Reader by selecting the 'Get Acrobat Reader' icon. When you follow the link to the Adobe Reader, you will leave the Tobacco Control Supersite and enter the Adobe site. Follow the instructions on the Adobe page for downloading the appropriate reader. When you have completed getting the Acrobat Reader, you will need to use your browser's BACK function to return to the Tobacco Control Supersite.
http://www.adobe.com/acrobat/readstep.html

How do I search the collection?
Search help is provided within the system. Click on the search help option once you are in the TDS database.

How often will the database be updated?
The database will be updated regularly. We urge you to visit often for new material.

Click here to conduct a quick search.

Click here to conduct an advanced search.