Library News Blog


A recent New York Times article notes that many classic dystopian novels are rising to the top of sales lists again. At the time of this writing, for instance, George Orwell's 1984 is at the top of the Amazon Best Sellers list. The NYT article posits several reasons why: perhaps the phrase "alternative facts" recalls the Ministry of Truth in 1984, or perhaps "sometimes, it’s nice to be reminded that things could be worse."

Many of the works mentioned in the article are available right here through the Lloyd Sealy Library. If you're in the mood for a dystopian novel, take your pick from the ones below.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985).
Stacks PR9199.3 .A8 H3 1998. Description.

1984 by George Orwell (1949).
Stacks PR6029 .R8 N647 2009 and in Browsing Collection. Description.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932).
Stacks PR 6015 .U9 B65 1963 and in Browsing Collection. Description.

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935).
Stacks PS3523.E94 I8. New Yorker article.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (2010).
Request from another CUNY. Description.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945).
Stacks PR 6029 .R8 A5 1982. Description.


Not sure how to find a book by its call number? See our guide.

Hitting your monthly limit of free NYT articles? Sign up for an NYT account through CUNY (a $200 value!).

January 31, 2017

Check out the new Fake News Cheatsheet!

Written by Barbara Gray, Chief Librarian and Associate Professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, this downloadable guide situates fake news in the context of fact-checking.

The guide includes questions to ask yourself about fake news (Who says? How do they know?) and an explanation of confirmation bias.

Front page of New York Times, January 16, 2017 — photo of President ObamaYesterday, the New York Times published a front-page article, "How Reading Nourished Obama During the White House Years." We have quoted parts of the article where Pres. Obama mentions authors and book titles, and noted where you can find these books at John Jay or across CUNY. For authors mentioned, we've pulled out just one or two notable works, but do check OneSearch to see our full holdings for each author.

Not sure how to find and check out books? Tutorial: jjay.cc/findbookJJ)

The writings of Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama found, were “particularly helpful” when “what you wanted was a sense of solidarity,” adding “during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating.” “So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that’s been useful.”

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. Located at Stacks E 457.92 1969

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Ebook link

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?  Ebook link

Gandhi

An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi. Located at Stacks DS 481 .G3 A34813 1983 and as ebook

Gandhi in India, in His Own Words. Located at Stacks DS 481 .G3 A3 1987

Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Located at Stacks DT 1949 .M35 A3 1995 

Even books initially picked up as escape reading like the Hugo Award-winning apocalyptic sci-fi epic “The Three-Body Problem” by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, he said, could unexpectedly put things in perspective: “The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade!”

The Three-Body Problem

Located at BMCC. Request from catalog (by Liu Cixin)

In his searching 1995 book “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama recalls how reading was a crucial tool in sorting out what he believed, dating back to his teenage years, when he immersed himself in works by Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois and Malcolm X in an effort “to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

James Baldwin

Collected Essays, located at Stacks PS 3552 .A45 A16 1998

Go Tell It On the Mountain, located at Stacks PS3552 .A45 G62 2005

Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man, located at Stacks PS3555 .L625 I5 1995

Langston Hughes

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, located at Stacks PS 3515 .U274 A6 1990

Richard Wright

Native Son, located on Reserve PS3545 .R815 N25 2005

Works (several novels and other writing) by Richard Wright, located at Stacks PS 3545 .R815 1991

W.E.B. DuBois

The Souls of Black Folk, located at Stacks E185.6 .D797 1990 and as an ebook

Black reconstruction (essay), located at Stacks E668 .D83 1956

Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, located at Stacks E 185.97 .L5 A3 1992 and as an ebook

Later, during his last two years in college, he spent a focused period of deep self-reflection and study, methodically reading philosophers from St. Augustine to Nietzsche, Emerson to Sartre to Niebuhr, to strip down and test his own beliefs.

St. Augustine

Confessions, located at Stacks BR65 .A6 E5 2008

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Portable Nietzsche (essays, letters, notes), located at Stacks B3312.E52 K3 1968

The Will to Power, located at Stacks B3313 .N5 1968

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays & Lectures, located at Stacks PS 1605 1983

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea, located at Stacks PQ 2637 .A82 N3 1964

Reinhold Niebuhr

The Irony of American History, located at Stacks E744 .N5 2008

To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Golden Notebook” and “The Woman Warrior”).

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Located at Stacks PQ8180.17 .A73 C513 2006 (by Gabriel García Márquez)

The Golden Notebook

Located at Stacks PR6023 .E833 G6 1999 (by Doris Lessing)

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts

Located at Stacks CT 275 .K5764 A33 1989 (by Maxine Hong Kingston)

And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night — reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction (the last novel he read was Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”) to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction.”

The Underground Railroad

Located in many CUNY libraries: check locations or request from catalog (by Colson Whitehead)

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Located at Stacks BF441 .K238 2011 (by Daniel Kahneman)

The Sixth Extinction

Located at Stacks QE721.2 .E97 K65 2014 (by Elizabeth Kolbert)

...for instance, he found that Marilynne Robinson’s novels connected him emotionally to the people he was meeting in Iowa during the 2008 campaign, and to his own grandparents, who were from the Midwest, and the small town values of hard work and honesty and humility.

Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping, located in the Browsing Collection

Other novels served as a kind of foil — something to argue with. V. S. Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in the River,” Mr. Obama recalls, “starts with the line ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ And I always think about that line and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.”

A Bend in the River

Located at Stacks PR 9272.9 .N32 B4 1979 (by V.S. Naipaul)

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speaks “to a very particular contemporary immigration experience,” but at the same time tell stories about “longing for this better place but also feeling displaced” — a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are “steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you’re giving up.”

Junot Díaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, located at Stacks PS3554 .I259 B75 2007

Drown, located at Reserve PS3554 .I259 D76 1997

Jhumpa Lahiri

The Namesake, located at Stacks PS3562 .A316 N36 2003

Interpreter of Maladies: Stories, located at Stacks PS3562 .A316 I58 1999

Philip Roth

American Pastoral, located at Stacks PS 3568 .O855 A77 1997

Saul Bellow

Herzog, located at Stacks PS 3503 .E4488 H45 1964

He had lunch last week with five novelists he admires — Dave Eggers, Mr. Whitehead, Zadie Smith, Mr. Díaz and Barbara Kingsolver.

Dave Eggers

What is the What, located at Stacks PS3605 .G48 W43 2007

Colson Whitehead

The Colossus of New York: a City in Thirteen Parts, located at Stacks F128.55 .W54 2003

Zadie Smith

On Beauty, located at Stacks PR6069.M59 O5 2006b

White Teeth, located at Stacks PR6069 .M59 W47 2001 and the Browsing Collection

Barbara Kingsolver

The Bean Trees, located at Stacks PS3561 .I496 P76 2000

Prodigal Summer, located at Stacks PS3561 .I496 P76 2000


Books by President Obama

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, located at Stacks E185.97 .O23 A3 2004

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, located at Stacks E901.1 .O23 A3 2006b

RCD • January 17, 2017

I was invited to participate in the 2016 Library Leaders Forum[1] which took place at the Internet Archive (IA) in San Francisco the last week of October. John Jay is a digitization partner with the IA, with which we have so far digitized 823 books, serial issues and pamphlets readable on their platform.[2] The first day was a celebration of the 20th birthday of the IA. Subsequent days gave us a deep dive into all the IA projects, which included their well-known website archive called “Wayback Machine” as well as the machines which provide microfilm, audio, film and book digitization. We were also introduced to the newly launched Political Ad Archive[3], which provides searchable coverage of the 2016 election and its aftermath, and GifCities: The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine.[4] We also learned about IA initiatives in research data management, website preservation and imaging standards. The forum included a diverse mix which included librarians, data archivists, technology specialists, lawyers, programmers and digital curators.

Take-aways from this conference are services that the Lloyd Sealy Library might consider using, should staff and funding become available, to solve some thorny digitization needs beyond books, which we will continue to digitize with the IA. Possibilities include using the IA’s “Archive It” to digitally preserve John Jay College webpages and submitting video in the College Archives to be preserved on the Moving Image Archive.[5] There is also the possibility of using the IA for digitizing microfilm in our collection, including our Criminal Trial Transcript Collection.

Some libraries have been using the Internet Archive to make post-1923 books that they physically own, digitally available using the IA Open Library[6] platform to lend them to one user at a time. This was called the 1/1/1 rule meaning one physical book can make one digital book which is lent to one user at a time. This has been particularly helpful for making print books digitally available in DAISY format to blind, low vision or other accessibility challenged readers, which has been interpreted as allowed by copyright law. An informative session on copyright implications of such practices was led by Michelle Wu, Law Librarian and Professor, Georgetown University Law Library and Lila Bailey, a legal counsel to the Internet Archive.

The conference included many opportunities to contribute to and shape the Internet Archive’s vision for Libraries in 2020. A white paper on this vision, written by IA founder and director Brewster Kahle – who called it version 0.0 - has been distributed for comment. Links to these and other resources on these topics are provided here: libraryleadersforum.org/learn-more.

I am available to discuss past, present and future Library digitization efforts with any interested member of the John Jay College community. We want these efforts to be helpful and relevant to the curriculum, criminal justice research and our collections as well as responsive to the needs of our patrons as we too move toward 2020. Please email me.

References

1. libraryleadersforum.org

2. archive.org/details/johnjaycollegeofcriminaljustice

3. politicaladarchive.org

4. blog.archive.org/2016/11/01/gifcities-the-geocities-animated-gif-search-engine

5. archive.org/details/movies

6. OpenLibrary.org

See also: Thorough report on the program from Yasmin Alnoamany

Photo of Library Leaders 2016 participants taken from the ceiling of Internet Archives Headquarters (posted by the IA on Twitter). The IA recently bought and moved into this former church because it looks just like their 20 year old logo (in center of photo).

Ellen Belcher

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter

The Special Collections has a small but growing collection of items related to John Jay, the man for whom our college is named. We recently received a number of objects back from our conservator, and they are now ready for research and exhibits. Here is a selection of before and after pictures of documents from our John Jay Collection. We thank Ursula Mitra of Mitra Conservation Services for her excellent work. To make an appointment to see these or any other of our Special Collections, please contact me.

four images of the letter in varying states of conservation

John Jay Letter to Mayor Richard Varick Sept. 2, 1791, was folded up in an old frame and mat (top). It is now in an open mat so that the full letter, as well as the seal and address on the back is visible. This letter was purchased for our Special Collections in the 1980s.

 

This Certification of Appointment of Daniel DeWolff, ensign April 26, 1797, was endorsed by John Jay, Governor of New York. We received this in 2015 (top left). Conservation treatment flattened out and lightly cleaned the document and encased it in acid free mylar, so the front and back can be viewed (bottom left). This matting also offers a better view of John Jay’s paper embossed seal, which is affixed with to the upper left of the document. We thank the DeWolff family for gifting this important document to the Library.

Bible before conservation

The Jay Family Bible is on long term deposit with the College. The Bible was in pretty bad shape when it arrived and we offered to send it to a conservator. Work involved reattaching some torn pages and edges, and reattaching the covers with a new leather spine. A custom box was created to protect it. Above are pictures of the Bible when we first received it, and below are pictures of it after conservation. We thank the Hughes family—who are descendants of John Jay—for making this resource available to researchers and the John Jay community.

Bible after conservation

Ellen Belcher

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter

Professor Andrea Balis has been teaching history at John Jay for 16 years. She teaches history methodology courses as well as a wide range of topics including the history of science and medicine. For the past two years, she has also been teaching Doing History, a course which focuses on how historians think and encourages students to examine physical and textual primary sources helping them to connect the past and the present.

What are some of the resources you encourage your students to take advantage of?

The library! And New York City. Free research resources in the city. The statue on your street corner.

When you developed “Doing History,” the title suggests action and experiential learning. What is the most valuable lesson students come away with in this class?

How to ask questions. That might well be the most important thing you learn at John Jay. Learning how to ask searchable questions. Learning how to investigate. And of course, the library teaches you how to investigate.

What are students’ attitude about this kind of approach when you first meet them?

Their experience is restricted. Most students’ experience with doing research is that they are given a topic but not questions. So they don’t know how to get from typing in the name of their topic to knowing how to find interesting ways to ask the questions.

How do you help them get started with that progression?

We teach content at John Jay, and we should. But we also have to teach learning curves. Knowing how to learn how to research is what keeps you from having a flat learning curve. This is my standard pitch: Knowing how to acquire new information is a critical 21st century skill, and that should be one of the things students think about while they’re here. In Doing History we spend a lot of time figuring out where to start, how to begin.

How can they get motivated to do that? Do you have tricks?

Yes! I have tricks but students need their own. You need to learn how to engage yourself. It might be that a way for you to connect is to look at pictures. For someone else it might be to listen to something or else it might be thumbing through newspaper articles. We all have things that spark our imagination in our everyday lives. We know how to find a pair of shoes we really want. We know how to find out the best way to apply make-up. What students need to realize is how to take those skills that they already have and connect them to the things they need to know in the professional or academic world. Students have research skills, but they don’t realize it. But you need to connect those things and know how to transfer your skills for finding the best price for a particular backpack – they are the same skills. That is research. You know what kind of question to ask if you’re looking for shoes. You know to look for materials, prices, heel height. You know the criteria. And people are good at it! So to motivate them is to remind them, “You already know how to do it.”

And Zappos.com is a database!

Yes! That should be the title.

Kathleen Collins

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter

An easy online clicker alternative

Classroom clickers have a number of benefits: they take the temperature of the class’s understanding through instant polls, they punctuate lectures with an engaging activity, and they encourage participation from those who would rather not speak up in class. Clickers are typically simple handheld devices that let students vote in polls whose results appear in real time on the screen. A number of large lecture classes at John Jay require students to bring clickers to class; the Library maintains a full set of clickers as well. Unfortunately for me, the clicker plugin is not compatible with my PowerPoint software for Mac. However, I was happy to find GoSoapbox, a full-featured, web-based clicker alternative.

Most students want to hear about saving money on textbooksGoSoapbox enables instructors to deploy polls and short discussion questions quickly and easily. It’s ideal for classroom labs, where every student is at their own computer, though the web app is also mobile-friendly. Instructor accounts are free for classes of 30 students or fewer. Instructors can create polls and discussion questions for each class, and each class’ content is saved under the instructor’s account and can be accessed again later. All collected responses can be downloaded or emailed. 

In every library class session I’ve led this semester, I’ve set up GoSoapbox activities. Students simply sign into gosoapbox.com with an access code (e.g., libraryweek) and enter their name or nickname. Generally, students have no trouble logging in and understanding how to participate. GoSoapbox does not collect any further personal information and does not require students to create accounts.

I have found GoSoapbox to be an excellent addition to my active learning curriculum. In my class sessions, I try to balance hands-on activities that are extrovert-friendly (like a fast-paced, shouty keyword guessing game) with those that are introvert-friendly (like contributing an answer to a GoSoapbox poll that is not timed). The GoSoapbox polls and discussion questions encourage all students to contribute replies that show up instantly on the big screen. The web app has been useful for me as an instructor for spotting misunderstandings of course curriculum that might have otherwise slid by. In some classes, the discussion questions have served as an easy place for students to collaborate in collecting keywords and resources for shared paper topics or group projects. For the latter activity, I send their professor a link after class so students can access their lists again.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with GoSoapbox. The setup is seamless and fast for both instructors and students. It’s a great way to collect data quickly without intruding on students’ privacy, and it encourages engagement and participation.

You can see more samples from classes I've taught on my Emerging Tech in Libraries blog.

Robin Davis

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter

In 2014, my article “Preserving the Historic Garden Suburb: Case Studies from London and New York” appeared in The Journal of Suburban Sustainability, a digital journal of the National Center from Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, where the paper was first presented. Soon after I began receiving monthly reports from Scholar Commons, a digital platform supported by the University of South Florida library, informing me of the number of downloads and their location. Interesting, I thought.

I posted this article and other essays and PowerPoints in CUNY Academic Works, the university’s digital repository, and now my monthly report includes information about those works also. Over the past two and a half years there have been a total of 1,398 downloads; the map shows the global distribution. “Preserving the Historic Garden Suburb” has been downloaded 682 times, and “Bombing for Justice: Urban Terrorism in New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s,” is at 391 (that article appeared in a volume found in the John Jay Library, and a total of 9 other institutions worldwide). I also posted an unpublished essay, “The City as Palimpsest,” about historic preservation, memory and the living city. There was no journal where I could place that, but since it went into Academic Works it has been downloaded 196 times at institutions from Yale and Columbia to the University of Nottingham and the National Technical University of Athens.

How do readers find these works? Most hits come through Google or Google Scholar, but many others come Academic Works itself, and I expect a growing number to come through OneSearch, a new tool for searching holdings in CUNY libraries found on the library’s home page. However they get there, researchers around the world have ready access to my work, and that is more than gratifying.

Jeffrey A. Kroessler

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter

A portion of the Open Access exhibit currently on display in the Niederhoffer Lounge

Today’s scholars have integrated open-access practices into their normal research routines. Did you know that you are already an open access supporter? By searching for and using freely-available research outlets, self-archiving your articles and data, and/or choosing to publish in open access journals, you are taking part in the open access movement.

Whether you are new to open access or your actions already support the principles behind the open access movement, consider doing more.

Maureen Richards & Ellen Sexton

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter

Issues & Controversies in American History

Although its name, Issues & Controversies in American History, suggests an exclusive focus on history, this recent addition to our databases has already proved to be helpful to students in a variety of courses. Covering a wide range of topics, from abolition to women’s rights, Issues & Controversies can be of use to students taking classes not just in American history, but also in Criminal Justice, Political Science and Government, as well as Africana and Gender studies. The collection covers topics that span from the Colonial Period to contemporary era. The featured subjects include Columbus’s Voyages to America, the Indian Removal Act, Universal Suffrage, Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many other landmark events John Jay students explore in their classes.

Subject index list

What sets Issues & Controversies apart from other databases that cover similar topics is its neat organization, consistent throughout all topics, the easy one-stop access to primary sources, and an annotated list of additional sources students can add on to their research.

For example, the entry for the Civil Rights Act of 1965 offers a context and historical background. Like all other entries, it also explores contemporary arguments for and against the legislation, and assesses the impact of the policy. The accompanying bibliography easily directs students to additional sources that may be available through the Library, and an annotated selection of external websites offers yet more resources. The primary sources are not limited to the text of the 1965 legislation. They also include the earlier versions of the legislation, presidential speeches on the subject, and contemporary court opinions. All in all, a student who explores the Civil Rights Act of 1965 through the database will get a rather good understanding of the issue and will be better prepared to engage with the topic through subsequent class readings or discussions.

Like most library databases, Issues & Controversies allows for printing, saving, and emailing. It also generates citations, a tool ever more popular with our students.

You will find Issues & Controversies in American History under the letter I on the alphabetical list of databases on the Library home page.

Marta Bladek

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter