The goal of the Informatics and Analytics Core is to assist the individual TCORS projects by providing information management, statistical analysis, and data management. The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) was created in 2002 to provide access to and preserve industry documents released as a result of litigation against the tobacco industry. Today, it is the largest source of information on the tobacco industry, including 80 million pages of industry documents and more than 8,600 video and audio tape titles. As part ofthe TCORS, we will enrich LTDL by integrating the new data from the individual Research Projects, which will add value and support new approaches to understanding perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of youth, young adults, and older adults in relation to tobacco marketing and labeling. Additionally, the added data will provide for a deeper and more updated resource for identifying tobacco marketing strategies and current examples of tobacco advertising. Two additional collections will be integrated into LTDL-Trinkets and Trash, an archive of tobacco marketing images, and the Canadian Tobacco Labelling Resource Center, which hosts a collection of images of international cigarette and other tobacco product warning labels and tobacco packages-to enable researchers to find multiple complementary pieces of data (contemporary ads, historical planning documents, marketing research, video or media, or archived websites). Additionally, the enhanced resource will promote a more sophisticated and meaningful understanding ofthe marketing strategies impacting particular populations. The Informatics component of this Core will also provide Web Archiving. In the past five years, marketing for new tobacco products (i.e. e- cigarettes) is increasingly found on websites, blogs, and other Web technologies. We will work with TCORS investigators to develop strategies to locate, acquire, and preserve such websites, and put records into LTDL to make the websites readily accessible to researchers. In addition to supporting the UCSF TCORS grantees and trainees, the Core will serve as a research resource for TCORS grants at other institutions and the FDA. All resources will be freely available to investigators worldwide. The Analytics capacity ofthe Core include selecting assessment measures, estimating anticipated effect sizes, conducting power calculations for sample size estimation and consulting on the design and conducting ofthe data analysis This includes preliminary, primary, and secondary analyses and control of Type I and Type II errors. Outlining strategies for analyzing unanticipated aspects ofthe data and handling missing data are also part ofthis work.
The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library is a unique resource unlike anything available elsewhere in the world. One can view images of cigarette ads, examine reports about the design of a marketing campaign, and watch a video of a focus group commenting on the campaign through this single resource that offers multiple perspectives on a research question. LTDL staff developed scanning algorithms that optimize full- text searching to create a powerful retrieval system that provides a unique view into the tobacco industry.
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