The SALIS Collection

The SALIS Collection is a growing multidisciplinary digital library of books focusing on the Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs and related fields. This collection is being built in partnership with the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and more located in California. The SALIS Collection Digitization Project, referred to as the Digs Project, is coordinated by the SALIS Advocacy Committee. The primary goal of The SALIS Collection is to provide a digital copy of every book on alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs stored in a single location for everyone around the world to access. This will both preserve the literature and support the information needs of researchers, clinicians, students, and the general public. The Collection holds books from North America, Europe, the UK and Australia, in English and other languages.

Access The SALIS Collection.

Since 2013, over 8,000 titles vital to the field of addiction and substance use have been added. Hundreds more are in the pipeline, awaiting digitization by the Internet Archive; more are added every month. Once the item is digitized, anyone can register to borrow a digital copy of a book and read it online. The borrowing period is one hour but up to two weeks if there is a second copy.
Already a popular resource, here are some testimonials.

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“I just tried my hand at searching the SALIS Collection, an impressive treasure trove of hard-to-find sources in the alcohol and drugs field that is part of the Internet Archive. It was easily accessible and a pleasure to be able to find all that material. More works are added all the time. Scholars, scientists, students, and researchers of all stripes will find it a very valuable resource.”

Craig Reinarman
Professor Emeritus of Sociology & Legal Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz

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From POINTS Editor Ron Roizen

If you haven’t yet made use of SALIS’s online library of alcohol & drugs sources, then you may have a real treat in store. It’s here: https://archive.org/details/salis/.

Whether or not (as I do) you happen to live in a small North Idaho hamlet, SALIS’s online collection is a alcohol & drug researcher’s godsend.

Say, for instance, I can’t find my copy of Pittman and Snyder’s classic 1962 volume, Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns, on my shelves. I just type in “Pittman and Snyder” at this website’s search field and up it pops. The same goes the Alcohol Research Group’s invaluable conference report, Alcohol and Disinhibition (1983); or Plaut’s Cooperative Commission report (1967), or, for that matter, Ernest Hurst Cherrington’s America and the World’s Liquor Problem (1922). Same goes for book after book in our field. One’s requested selection appears onscreen in the Internet Archive’s page-turning format. The SALIS online library’s interface also allows for searches using a number of different approaches. And the service is free.

For my part, I think SALIS’s online library project represents a terrific and still-evolving resource for our research community—one that well deserves a helping hand from us.

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SALIS has done more than any other organization to collect, preserve, and disseminate the addictions field’s core body of knowledge. I have relied on this skilled and dedicated network of information specialists since SALIS was founded in 1978 and encourage everyone to support SALIS’ continued efforts to preserve our history and serve our present information support needs.

–William White, Author, Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America

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If you have a research interest in the area of alcohol and other drugs, you should check out and use the SALIS Collection. By now, it has more than 5,000 items in it, fully digitised. It includes many of the major books in the field from the last half-century, as well as much from earlier and also newsletters and other more fugitive materials. When you need to read a classic source or to look up a discussion you vaguely remember, the SALIS Collection should be your first stop. In this era when university libraries are getting rid of their books, the SALIS Collection is becoming a more and more valuable resource for scholarship.

–Robin Room, Distinguished Professor, La Trobe Univ.; Professor, Centre for Social Research in Alcohol & Drugs, Stockholm Univ.

A Sample of Popular Titles

Recent Additions
The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) Collection:
2,264 titles have been added from the DPA Library. The DPA, based in New York City, works to end the drug wars. Although part of the SALIS Collection, the DPA Collection can be viewed and searched separately.

Core US Government Series:
TIP and TAP Series, NIDA and NIAAA Research Monographs, Reports of the Surgeon General.

From Europe:
EMCDDA Reports (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs & Drug Addiction)

For the full story of how this project started and took off read The SALIS Collection unveiled: Building an ATOD digital archive. in The SALIS Journal, Proceedings of the 37th annual SALIS conference, Vol 2, 2015, pages 100-104.

Searching The SALIS Collection
For help with search strategies to find what you need, refer to this guide.

You can help build the SALIS Collection!

SALIS members and Friends of SALIS are contributing books to be scanned into The SALIS Collection within the Internet Archive, as well as donating funds to support this effort. We’re selecting books of significance to the field from any relevant discipline — medicine, psychology, history, sociology — and more.

Support the SALIS Collection any time by donating through Support SALIS! Just $40 covers digitizing one book!

For more information about supporting this project please contact:
Andrea Mitchell, SALIS Executive Director
E-mail: amitchell@salis.org
Tel: 510-865-6225