Researching Asbestos History: Some Words of Wisdom

Researching asbestos history is difficult — lots of mistakes (especially about the science), experts and attorneys with private data/document silos, significant paywalls to get articles, inconsistent claims trying to reconcile studies that have been undertaken in the Global South to those using the countries of the Global North, and on and on and on. This blog will provide some places for you to start.

As examples:

1. Hathi Digital Trust — check to see if your former schools or current school has access to the Hathi Digital Trust documents. That database contains about 21 million digitized documents. I get full access through my University of Michigan and Cornell University access codes as they are Level 1 research institutions while my access is limited using my University of Colorado at Colorado Springs as it is a Level 2 research institution.
2. Research toxicdocs.org — it has a lot of good asbestos-related historical documents especially as involved in the international issues.
3. Check into your relevant organizations which likely have databases of documents — in the United States that would include Plaintiff attorney organizations and Defense attorney organizations. It also includes Brad Drew at Pace as they have somewhere around 2 million pages on asbestos history digitized. https://www.paceclaims.com/employees/bradley-drew/
4. Download document repositories that are on line. An example was the website once run by Dr. David Egilman. He, at one point, had an overwhelming number of documents well indexed by organization and issue. For those of us who were starting to collect our own libraries, it was an excellent place to begin — sort of like a young kid is a candy store. I suspect that experts, organizations, and attorneys who are overseas (and maybe U.S. domestic) may well provide similar access.
5. Discovery responses by others — such as the year 1982 discovery responses by Johns-Manville.
6. Libraries near you — I recently found out (by accident) that the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs provides access to a certain collection of digitized documents. One of these collections included Selikoff’s 1978 book on asbestos diseases. The license for this book included my ability to download a PDF version of the book to my computer along with the fair use ability. The hard copies of this book that I could find over the internet were in excess of $400.
7. Read my blogs — I have written over 200 and I would be happy to send you an Index with titles, dates, and hotlinks.
8. Check at the Smithsonian, National Archivies, and local historical societies and libraries.
9. Freedom of Information Act submissions to governmental libraries.
10. Obtain a copy of the 1929 New York Library Reference for asbestos — it has a ton of information and can be obtained from the Hathi Digital Trust.
11. Hire a clerk to search for historical documents. This type of project is perfect for a young clerk. As an example, I had hired my son Mark to do a deep dig on asbestos history back when I was practicing law. Using the type of materials discussed above, and a creative success bonus payment, it was perfect.
12. Email or call me to see if I can help — no charge.

Remember, try to find primary source documents as secondary sources are more likely to be in error. I am in the process of collecting the identities of asbestos archives, with a focus on primary source documents. This is a major project that I hope to complete the end by the middle of summer.

Let me know what you think or if you have a favorite archive/repository by leaving a comment or sending me an email at TheAsbestosBlog@gmail.com. Thanks. Marty