Today is Blogshine Sunday. I wrote about how to participte earlier.

I'll just briefly mention one of the first uses of the web to distribute documents, the Tobacco Control Archives at UCSF. In 1994, someone left thousands of tobacco industry documents at Professor Stanton Glantz's office. He had those papers scanned and put online as what came to be called the Brown & Williamson collection. They continue to add new material. Just last week, there were stories on the influence Philip Morris had on a research paper on second hand smoke.

There also are two books Glantz co-wrote online, The Cigarette Papers Online and Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles.

Glantz was interviewed about the papers by Frontline.

There is also a similar UK collection.

Glantz's son Aaron is a reporter for KPFA and Pacific and has been reporting from Iraq.

Unlike many of the blogshine entries, I've focused on corporate documents because it is also important they be open to sunshine.

If you are interested in government documents, a good book to read is Secrets: The CIA's War at Home by the late Angus Mackenzie. I got trained in doing FOIA requests when I was an intern at the Center for Investigative Reporting back in 1993.