New content alert! We are delighted to share the great news: the digitization of the Alcoholism Treatment Digest (ISSN: 0002-5046) is now complete. All issues owned by Rutgers University Libraries are available in the Digital Alcohol Studies Archive in RUcore, the Rutgers University Community Repository, an open access resource.
A new publication model
As reviewed earlier, the Alcoholism Treatment Digest was a trailblazing periodical published from 1950 to 1973 at the Center of Alcohol Studies (CAS), first at Yale University. When CAS was forced to leave, they moved to Rutgers in 1962. So did the editorial department of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol (QJSA), which selected and prepared the articles to review for the Digest.
The model was innovative at that time. Spearheaded by Mark Keller, QJSA editorial staff wrote short review articles on emerging topics in the alcohol literature that would be of interests for diverse medical and healthcare communities all over the United States and in English-speaking countries. As for duplication and distribution, the issues were typed and mimeographed for subscribers.
As the only scholarly journal in the field for a long time, QJSA was uniquely positioned to experiment, explore, and pilot new methods of sharing and organizing information for scientific and lay communities as well as publishing anything related to alcohol, from a scholarly journal to popular pamphlets.
Target audience
More than 70 years ago, physicians were just as busy and overwhelmed, there were no computers, let alone the Internet, to make their lives easier, so 4-5 summaries in one issue on new publications from vetted resources and written by experts were welcomed additions to subscribers to the services of what we’d call today “a content provider.” Selected reviews were picked up by other media, such as the Connecticut Review on Alcoholism, and shared widely.
In other words, subscribers “repackaged” and shared as many reviews from an issue as they wanted. Sound familiar? Did these guys invent scholarly social media in print as early as in the 1950s?
Today each and every subgroup prides itself of publishing its own scholarly or professional journal, and it’s no different in the addiction field either. Addiction medicine, addiction nursing or counseling, the psychology of addiction, and dual diagnosis benefit from the expertise of talented editors with an eye for the best and latest advances in their field. And that’s just one small segment of publishing addiction science.
Background
Disseminating alcohol information was among the original five pillars of alcohol studies at Yale. Selecting, indexing, and abstracting scholarly articles, books, book chapters, and other publications was exactly what QJSA pioneered, established, and advanced. In the background of the groundbreaking journal was the famous project to review the world’s alcohol literature, thanks to a grant provided by the Carnegie Corporation to Research Council on Problems of Alcohol in 1939, the results of which needed an outlet to publish: a corporation was founded in 1940 at Yale to accomplish that, launching Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol.
Originally designed to fill a research gap surveying and reviewing scattered literature on alcohol, the project, led by medical director Dr. Norman Jolliffe and executive director E.M. Jellinek, was so successful that the staff of scholars and documentalists was invited to continue the operations at the Laboratory of Applied Physiology at Yale. The abstracts, later published in QJSA, became the foundation of a repository for publications on alcohol that became famous as the Classified Abstract Archive of the Alcohol Literature (CAAAL) distributed internationally. Out of these efforts also grew an Information Division within the laboratory, which housed, organized, and cataloged the alcohol literature, resulting in the Library and Archives of the Center Alcohol Studies.
The Digest today
The Alcoholism Treatment Digest attests to the early interests of physicians towards treating patients with substance use. Judging from the tables of contents accompanying each issue for better searching, topics represent a broad spectrum of treatment options and methods from pharmaceutical products to attending meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous. Notable is the range of populations singled out for treatment and the language used in these reviews, the latter is definitely worth its own post!
The oldest alcohol research institution in the United States, now called the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies, which publishes the oldest and longest running scholarly journal in the field, now called the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, is still at Rutgers. So are the copies of the Alcoholism Treatment Digest, in print in the Rutgers Libraries Annex and online in RUcore.
Acknowledgments
It takes a village. Many thanks to Jamey Silverstein, library associate in the Annex and Isaiah Beard, digital data curator at RUL, for their contributions to this side project of the big one, the Digital Alcohol Studies Archive.
The Center today, with the iconic bridge, on Busch campus. Sketch by Megan Lotts, art librarian (RUL)