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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.
At present, the vast majority of documents produced by BAT in litigation are only available at the Guildford Depository. Researchers must travel to the depository to search the collection, 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 are 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.
This Web site currently contains more than 6 million pages of documents.
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