About the
4B Index
The 4B Index is a compilation of indexes developed and provided by each of the tobacco companies that were defendants in the State of Minnesota vs. Philip Morris Inc., et. al. It contains objective indexing information about the documents provided during the litigation that are now housed at the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository.
The index is called the 4B Index because 4B is the clause number in the court order issued July 17, 1995, by the Minnesota District Court, which ordered the defendants to provide an index to the documents produced in discovery in this case along with the actual documents. The 4B Index is the index that is used to search at the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository. To
provide easier access, this version of the 4B Index is merged into one index; at the Depository, users must search each individual company’s 4B index.
How to Use the 4B Index
A search of the 4B Index provides users with selected citations to the approximately 4 million tobacco industry documents that are stored in the Minnesota Depository and may also be available on the tobacco company’s Web sites. The following companies and organizations provide industry documents on the Internet: American Tobacco Company (found at the Brown & Williamson site), Brown & Williamson, Council
for Tobacco Research, Lorillard Tobacco Company, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and the Tobacco Institute. Users may link to these sites following the navigation on the left margin to the Industry Document Web Sites. Currently, Liggett Company and British American Tobacco do not have industry documents available on the Web sites. However, approximately 7,000 British American Tobacco documents are available as part of the Guildford – British American Tobacco Documents subset
of the Minnesota Select Set.
You may obtain copies of documents you want in two ways:
1)
You may order scanned images or photocopies of documents by providing inclusive Bates numbers, box number, and company name from the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository. At the beginning of each search result citation is a hyperlink to forms for ordering a scanned image or photocopy of that particular item. The required information is automatically
filled into the form for that document. If you want additional documents from this particular company or box, you must complete this information. This form may be faxed or e-mailed as an attachment to the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository.
2) Another way to obtain a copy of a document is to use the information provided in the search result to find the document on one of the tobacco company Web sites. Use the navigation provided on the left margin of the 4B Results page to the Industry Document Web Sites link and browse to link to the site of the company name listed in the citation – usually the fifth field of the document result citation. Users may wish
to copy the Bates Number in order to locate this particular item on a company Web site. Using the beginning Bates Number is usually the most efficient way to locate the item as this number is
unique to that page and document.
Bates Number Problems
Alpha/numeric Bates Numbers pose particular retrieval problems. For some companies, the space between an alpha/numeric Bates Number is disregarded, and users can search using the space. However, other companies do not recognize the space and users must insert a "0" (zero) into the Bates Number between the alpha and numeric portions of the Bates Number. If you do not retrieve a document using the Bates Number, try
deleting the space or replacing the space with a "0" (zero).
|
