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SAN FRANCISCO — The University of California, San Francisco said Wednesday it will use a $15 million gift to maintain documents on the tobacco industry in a permanent online archive and to establish a research center to study the material. 

Tobacco companies were required to put the documents online under terms of a 1998 settlement with states, but they would have been able to remove them in 2010. 

The grant came from the American Legacy Foundation, an anti-smoking organization created by the settlement.  

The settlement also required tobacco companies to pay $206 billion over 25 years to settle lawsuits by 46 states over the costs of treating sick smokers. 

About 100,000 pages are available through the current UCSF online library of tobacco documents, and that will be expanded to about 40 million pages, most which have become public knowledge through litigation by state attorneys general. The new archive could be up within a year. 

Part of the endowment will be used to fund the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, which will promote studies of tobacco documents and train scholars in the field. 

“This will provide the public health forces with the ammunition necessary to fight the industry,” said Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern and president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center. 

Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co., whose brands include Kool and Lucky Strike, points out that tobacco companies made much of the information available years ago through their own Web sites. 

But the aim of the new archive is to add information and to make it user-friendly, according to UCSF and the foundation. 

“We see the investment and the activities here as really a global resource to tackle what is really a global problem,” said Derek Yach, manager of the tobacco-free initiative for the World Health Organization.  

“To date, we have not been able to understand tobacco companies’ activities well enough to pre-empt them.” 

Only about 4 percent of the world’s smokers live in the United States, Yach said.  

Timing for the project is critical, he said, because the WHO has begun negotiating what would be the first global treaty on tobacco control. 

UCSF became a crucial source of tobacco industry information in 1994 when Prof. Stanton Glantz received 4,000 pages of secret tobacco industry documents from a source known only as Mr. Butts. 

A paralegal working for a law firm representing Brown & Williamson had been taking documents from the firm’s office since 1988, according to UCSF. Brown & Williamson filed suit in 1995 to keep the information private, but the state Supreme Court denied the request.  

The documents were placed online in the UCSF library that year, and the current online collection has attracted about 500,000 hits a month. 

“When the history of the tobacco issue is written, it will be before the documents and after the documents,” Glantz said. “They have completely changed the whole issue by allowing people to understand ... just how the tobacco industry operates.” 

Glantz will be director of the academic center, and Karen Butter, assistant vice chancellor for library services and instruction technology at UCSF, has been named director of the library.