The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Industry Documents Library (IDL) has been rebuilt and launched with improvements to the design, user experience, accessibility, and performance.
Since 2002, the IDL has been a digital archive that provides free public access to millions of documents obtained from industries that impact human health, including tobacco, opioid, drug, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries. The IDL was initially established to house previously internal tobacco industry documents disclosed through lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers and from other sources. For the last 23 years, the IDL has supported over 1,200 evidence-based publications by researchers, lawyers, public health experts, journalists, policymakers, historians, and others. These publications have significantly contributed to tobacco control policy and legislation (including the World Health Organization’s first global health treaty), and their discoverability has had a life-saving impact in reducing tobacco-related deaths worldwide.
Inception of the redesign
In 2021, the IDL became the repository for vast amounts of data disclosed from public interest lawsuits against opioid manufacturers. In collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, IDL created the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) which currently contains over five million documents. Archiving these opioid industry documents required the IDL team to develop a new strategy for expanding IDL’s technical infrastructure and website user interface (UI) to support the rapidly growing collections. Goals for this strategy included:
- Modernizing the website’s UI
- Improving web accessibility
- Building a mobile-friendly interface
- Improving search performance
- Implementing user-requested features, including those from key stakeholders in state attorneys’ general offices and partner institutions
The IDL team also committed to using open-source tools to encourage collaboration and allow other libraries and archives to build similar platforms more easily and cheaply. “We found that using open-source tools significantly reduced project costs,” said Rebecca Tang, the IDL software developer and technical lead. “They also provided full transparency of the codebase, allowing us to customize solutions to our needs and contribute improvements back to the community.”
Considerations for the redesign
The website redesign began in 2022 and required in-depth user experience (UX) and UI research and implementation for a system containing more than 24 million documents in diverse formats from various sources. The IDL team had to address the challenge of making varied file formats, such as audio files, PowerPoint slides, and text documents, viewable in the same interface. It was also challenging to perfect indexing methods for these documents. One challenge we faced was designing an interface that could effectively support different types of audiences,” Tang added. “Novices and experts have very different needs, which require careful consideration in our approach. Another challenge was designing for multiple screen sizes—widescreen, laptop, mobile, and tablet—while ensuring that accessibility requirements were fully supported.”
The new Industry Documents Library website will significantly improve access to industry documents for all audiences and will support crucial public health investigations by researchers in the UCSF community, the U.S., and around the world.
Kate Tasker, Director of the Industry Documents Library
Outcomes
The new website supports a robust user community, which logged over 110,000 visits in calendar year 2024 (with over 8 million visits since 2002). The project has also significantly improved the IDL’s web accessibility, server management, cost efficiency, and security. “The new IDL website will significantly improve access to industry documents for all audiences and will support crucial public health investigations by researchers in the UCSF community, the U.S., and around the world,” said Kate Tasker, director of the IDL. For their efforts, the 2025 UC Tech Awards bestowed the Silver Award for design on the IDL team. The team will also present the website at library and information science conferences to encourage further collaborations and adoption of the unique approach to preserving and providing access to industry documents for the public good, especially as the collections grow.
Website open house
The IDL’s archivists hosted a live webinar on September 9, where they demonstrated new features on the website and answered questions from attendees. The open house webinar recording is now available on the IDL’s YouTube channel.