The Digital Alcohol Studies Archives aim to preserve a small fragment of the resources formerly available for researchers at the Library and Archives maintained by the Information Services Division at the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies, closed in December 2016.

The Rutgers Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies is the first interdisciplinary research center devoted to alcohol use and alcohol-related problems and treatment. Evolving in the late 1930s and 1940s at the Yale University Laboratory of Applied Physiology and Biodynamics, which was directed by Yale physician Howard W. Haggard, the Section on Alcohol Studies, headed by E.M. Jellinek, pursued studies of the effects of alcohol on the body, which broadened into a wide perspective of alcohol-related problems.

The increasing demand for information about alcoholism led the Center to found the Summer School of Alcohol Studies in 1943. In 1944, the Center also began the Yale Plan Clinics, the first ever outpatient facilities for the treatment of alcoholism. The Yale Plan for Business and Industry, forerunner of current-day employee assistance programs, also began in the mid-1940s, in response to requests from business and industry having to cope with employment shortages during World War II. Another of Dr. Haggard’s contributions to the field was the founding of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol in 1940.

In 1962, the Center moved to Rutgers University and has continued its research tradition ever since with research programs and pre- and postdoctoral training in clinical and experimental psychology, neuropharmacology, psychophysiology, sociology, public health, social work, and prevention.