The American Medical Association (AMA) has a unique collection of documents and materials, referred to as the Historical Health Fraud Collection. In 1906, the AMA formed the Propaganda Department, which tested products and answered inquiries from physicians and the public in order to educate them concerning the efficacy of proprietary or privately promoted medicines and devices. The Department and its successor, the Bureau of Investigation, amassed a collection of thousands of advertisements, promotional pamphlets, correspondence, testimonials, and texts of judicial actions regarding quackery which is now in the Archives of the Division of Library and Information Management (DLIM) at the AMA. The Historical Health Fraud Collection consists of 10,000 folders representing more than 3,500 separate files on questionable practice from 1906 through 1969. Some efforts to sort and catalog the folder contents are currently being performed manually on a limited basis. A major two-year project is being proposed in this application to ensure that this collection will be preserved, analyzed, organized, processed, and cataloged according to accepted archival and national bibliographic standards. The long-term goal of the project is to provide access for health and social history research to this unique collection of historical documents that chronicles the history of health fraud and its impact on medical consumers and practitioners. The short-tem goals of the two-year project are that: (1) the documents and materials that comprise the Historical Health Fraud Collection will be preserved through the efforts of a trained and qualified document archivist and preservationist; (2) the Collection will be cataloged using Machine Readable Cataloging format for Archives and Manuscripts (MARC/AMC) format on the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) database IBM Personal Computer (PC) M300 XTF. Each folder entry will include a descriptive summary of the contents; (3) a hardcopy guide, somewhat similar to the National Union Catalog Manuscript Collections will be developed from the OCLC files. The guide will contain a subject and proper name index which will refer to an individual folder's entry; and (4) the Collection and its access tools will be publicized to public and to academic libraries and appropriate medical and historical societies.
