November 18, 2018
The Digitized Sanjour Hazardous Waste Files Collection Name = Sanjour Hazardous Waste Files
- The Sanjour Hazardous Waste Files are the personal work files of William Sanjour, collected while he was employed at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1974 to 2001. William Sanjour is perhaps the EPA’s best-known whistleblower. The files served as the basis of his later Internet memoir “FROM THE FILES OF A WHISTLEBLOWER: Or how EPA was captured by the industry it regulated” (http://williamsanjour.name/memoirs.html). This Internet memoir can be used as a guide to the digitized collection.
- The original documents were given to the Bioscience Resource Project by William Sanjour in May 2018, to enable their digitization and to make them freely available to the public. This includes making them freely available on DocumentCloud and donating a complete copy of the digitized documents to the UCSF Chemical Document Library.
- The digitized files comprise 2,672 PDF files total. Number of Pages = 39,347 pages including blank scans.
- The order of the files in William Sanjour’s filing cabinet was preserved during scanning and digitization. This was done to keep related material together and facilitate research.
- Each PDF file is labeled with WasteWS— and a U.S.-style date (e.g. 0511201- –) and a 24-hour-clock scan time, including seconds (e.g. pdf).
- Pages were scanned front and back– so if the back of the page was blank, the digitized page is blank.
- Some pages are upside down because it was the only way to get them through the scanner during rapid scanning.
- Each PDF file is a single document, except when the originals had been collected together by William Sanjour with a binder clip, 3 ring binder, or in a file for a specific purpose.
- The only redactions were of personal information such as social security numbers and home addresses or phone numbers.
- Some non-primary source documents (eg. newspaper clippings, magazine articles) are incomplete with first page and/or other identifying information only.
- EPA reports collected by William Sanjour were downloaded from the EPA document website rather than re-scanned.
