From the Desk of the Chief Librarian
Sing Sing is hot -- in a number of ways. One of the college's more exciting exhibits this year focused on the Sing Sing Death House. The visual recital of the numerous convicts who met their end in Sing Sing's electric chair or through other lethal means was chilling. Sing Sing looms large in our popular imagination – terms and phrases such as "The Big House" and "Up the River" come from this famous penitentiary. Many of our readers know that Sealy Library is the repository of the papers of Sing Sing's most famous warden, Lewis Lawes. Many items from the Lawes papers complemented the Sing Sing Death House exhibit.
Lawes is also the subject of a number of projects coming up in the near future. At least three historians have been using the Library’s collection for biographies of Lawes or histories of Sing Sing. And as I write, a Los Angeles production team is requesting photographs from the Lawes papers for a documentary on Sing Sing.
The fact that we have such splendid special collections has generated additional gifts of unique items. One of the most significant gifts of recent memory was the noted prison historian Norman Johnston's donation of well over one hundred architectural drawings of prisons in the United States and abroad. We can follow historical concepts of punishment through the physical arrangement of space for prisoners; these plans, covering a wide variety of prisons, are invaluable for scholarly research on prison history. Once again, I believe that this flurry of activity related to our Special Collections illustrates the importance of integrating historical with contemporary materials in order to present a balanced view of our criminal justice system.
While we are on the subject of prisons, my own collection of convict memoirs and other prison-related items is on exhibit from May until October 18 and was the subject of a New York Times article on August 26 about convict literature. The exhibit is now slated to travel to the Midwest in the Spring of 2001.
Larry Sullivan
Library Services from a Distance
Ever since the days of Vannevar Bush and his know-it-all memex machine (Atlantic, July 1945), researchers have envisioned instant access to all of the tools of the scholar’s trade. Distance education is but the latest impetus towards universal access. Many of our services are now available from home, fulfilling Bush’s dream.
Where to click? The main portal is Home Use on our webpage. From there, you can browse more than 50 databases, specialized and general. Some, like InfoTrac and Lexis-Nexis, give articles in full text, not just citations and abstracts. Lexis-Nexis is an exhaustive repository of legal cases, Supreme Court Shepard’s Citations, law reviews, newspaper articles, and the business press.
To find books, our CUNY+ catalog is available from computers everywhere. An additional “bibliographic utility,” WorldCat, gives information on titles in libraries around the world. WorldCat is on the alphabetical list of Electronic Information Sources.
If you need help with your searching, you can ask reference questions remotely by e-mail at libref@cunyvm.cuny.edu Questions are not limited to “How do I...?”and What is best for...?” but can encompass anything about conducting research or accessing resources. It may take 24 hours to get an e-mail response, but we are working towards interactive reference. There is also telephone reference during the more than 70 hours a week that the library is open.
Electronic reserves is an expanding service being used for selected classes . Scanned reserve material is entered into a database for the use of members of the designated class, who access it from anywhere with a password.
E-mail interlibrary loan requests and renewals are available for faculty and graduate students as well as online book renewal for everyone. See the articles on these below. The Sealy Library is always increasing the scope of its “library without walls” and we look forward to your comments and further ideas.
Janice Dunham
Interlibrary Loan News
The university is experimenting with various software packages that will in the future enable patrons to initiate interlibrary loan transactions from CUNY libraries via the online catalog. While this move towards patron empowerment is inevitable, it may take some time, as there are many staffing and operational implications to consider. In the meantime, any interlibrary loan requests (from within or outside of CUNY) should still be submitted on Interlibrary Loan request forms
In order to expedite faculty and graduate student research, I.L.L. requests may be e-mailed. Send these to DeeDee Aikens at DAikens@jjay.cuny.edu with a complete citation. If you are having trouble with a citation or have a question about a policy or procedure, you may call or e-mail Nancy Egan. In the past few years there has been an increase in the number of items borrowed for John Jay patrons and we would like to see this trend continue. Historically, most of our interlibrary loan business consists of sending our materials out to other libraries, making us a “net lender.”
Nancy Egan
Renewing Books Electronically
The Library is inaugurating a convenient new electronic method for renewing borrowed John Jay books. It uses the Web to navigate to the Library’s home page, where the patron clicks on "Renew your books online" from the main page. A form appears and prompts the user for her name, e-mail address, library patron bar code number and the bar code numbers of the books to be renewed.
Renewals will be processed within two business days and will only be complete when the user receives an e-mail confirmation with the new due date. Any overdue fines attached to renewed items will automatically be added to the patron record for payment at a later time.
In accordance with Library policy, books may be renewed only once and may not be more than 10 days overdue at the time of renewal. Patrons who are blocked due to fines or overdue items will not be eligible to utilize this service.
Telephone renewal is still available for faculty and graduate students at 212 237-8224 or 212 237-8263.
Kathy Killoran
Science Journals on the Web
Researchers interested in medical and science journals are finding more full-text journals freely available on the web than ever before. Highwire Press and Pubmed provide the best gateway for life sciences and medical journals.
Stanford University's Highwire Press provides a free searchable database at http://highwire.stanford.edu . Over 700,000 articles are indexed, with over 171,000 of them available free in full text. The catch is that most of the free articles are a year or so old, with the journals reserving their most recent papers for their paying customers. Full-text journal titles include the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, Alcohol and Alcoholism, and the Journal of Cell Biology. Highwire also indexes a small number of sociology journals, but none are making their full text available free of charge.
Highwire's publisher hopes to expand coverage to all disciplines eventually, but for now, the collection appears heavily slanted towards medicine, biomedicine and biochemistry. The National Library of Medicine is working with publishers to provide access to some journals indexed in the Medline database. If you have been using Medline recently using the Pubmed interface at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi you may have noticed the words “link out” next to some article titles.
“Link out” indicates that there is a link to the full text of the article. There are three types of linkages. One will take you to the free full text of the article. Another is put in by a specific library and will allow you to access the full text only if you are authorized to use that library. The third type of link allows you access to the full text only if you are a subscriber, or if you are willing to pay to access the article.
The option of paying to access a single article is increasingly being offered at journals’ own websites. This service allows individuals to request reprints of articles from the publisher with instant delivery. This trend offers an alternate vision of electronic document delivery, with the publisher contracting directly with an individual, without a library acting as an intermediary. For those researchers for whom time is more important than money, the full-text of the article is only a click away. Those of us in less of a hurry to empty our wallets will continue to rely on interlibrary loan services to provide us with our articles free of charge.
Ellen Sexton
European Union at your Fingertips
The European Union (known as the European Community until 1993) is a unique institution based upon treaties among 15 European member countries, with the goals of maintenance of peace, economic cooperation and political union among the peoples of Europe. The EU is a prolific publisher, and finding specific information is difficult. Documents are produced and distributed by various EU institutions according to their own rules, and information is not always available in English.
Certain libraries have been designated as official depositories of EU publications. The NYU Law School Library and the Science, Industry and Business division of the New York Public Library are the EU depositories in New York City.
A wealth of EU information can be accessed over the Internet free of charge. But serious researchers should remember that the WWW material complements the other formats rather than replacing them. Keep in mind that many EU databases may use different spelling (e.g., labour instead of labor) or different expressions (e.g., competition instead of anti-trust). The following sites are useful:
http://www.euruion.org Official site of the delegation of the European Commission to the United States, this is a good starting point to learn about the EU, its legislation and policies.
http://europa.eu.int/index-en.htm This is the official server of the EU, with basic information about the EU and a gateway to the following institutions: The Parliament, the Council, the Commission, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors and other EU bodies.
http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/EN/cadreprincipal.htm Here one may search for conventions and agreements in the European Treaty Series. Included are the text and summary of treaties in English and French.
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/index.html The Official Journal of the European Communities is issued daily in 11 languages and consists of two related series, the L series (Legislation) and the C series (Information, notices and preparatory EU legislation). Access to recent case-law of the European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance is available on this site.
http://europa.eu.int/prelex/apcnet.crm?CL=en PreLex, the database on inter-institutional procedures follows the major stages of the decision-making process between the Commission of the EU and the other institutions and monitors the works of the various institutions involved (European Parliament, Council, ESC, Committee of the Regions, European central Bank, Court of Justice, etc.).
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/r/dors/oeil/en/default.htm The Legislative Observatory follows the legislative process and the role of the European Parliament.
http://curia.eu.int Official cite of the Court of Justice of the European Communities, this has recent case law.
http://www.emcdda.org – This site is the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addition.
Maria Kiriakova
Faculty Favorites
.... wherein members of the faculty share their favorite books with us all.
Janice Dunham
Rubie Malone: Yesterday, I cried, by Iyanla Vanzant (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
“This excellent book deals with lessons of life’s hardships. By relating her story to many of the situations SEEK students experience, I’m able to help students realize that they can have some control over their lives. As Vanzant’s story illustrates, “the pain of the past does not have to be today’s reality.” This is a simple, easy-reading book with a powerful message. I seldom have the opportunity to enjoy reading books other than academic material, but, after hearing this deeply spiritual woman speak at a seminar, I was moved to read her works. I was very inspired by Vanzant’s ability to show how “yesterday’s tears become the seeds of today’s hope, renewal and strength.” This is a very significant message many SEEK students must embrace as they move toward successfully Searching for Education, Elevation and Knowledge.”
Shepard’s Citations at Home
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe now has Shepard’s Citations for U.S. Supreme Court cases in its legal research database. This means that everyone can access Shepard’s from home, since Lexis-Nexis is available on the college proxy server. Previously, Westlaw had the only electronic legal citation service available to John Jay. While faculty members may obtain a password from the Library to use Westlaw from home (contact Bonnie Nelson for information), students are limited to library use on a sign-up basis. Please notify your students of the new Shepard’s service in Lexis-Nexis.
Nancy Egan
Information Literacy: Library Classes
This semester, as in the past, the Library is offering classes in its electronic classroom. Due to budget and staff considerations, we must always limit the number of classes that we offer. We have developed a list of classes that we intend to target as the ones likely to benefit students the most. This includes a number of lower level courses as well as at least one upper level course required for every baccalaureate major offered at John Jay. Contact Tony Simpson for details.
To supplement these classes, we offer six half-hour sessions a week which are open to everyone on a walk-in basis. These cover a broad range of information systems, including the World Wide Web. Schedules of these “mini-classes” are available at the reference desk.
Tony Simpson
Book Browsers
Diaz, Tom. Making a killing: the business of guns in America. New York: New Press, 1999. HD 9744 .F553 U63 1999
Foley, Michael Oliver. Police perjury: a factorial study. Ph.D. Thesis, CUNY, 2000. LD 3835 .A5 F64 2000
Gilroy, Paul. Against race: imagining political culture beyond the color line. Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press, 2000. HT 1521 .G524 2000
Glaeser, Andreas. Divided in unity: identity, Germany, and the Berlin police. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000. HV 8210 .B4 G56 2000
Jones-Brown, Delores. Race, crime and punishment. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. HV 6197 .U5 B76 2000
Lethal imagination: violence and brutality in American history. Michael Bellesiles, ed. New York: NYU Press, 1999. E 179 .L44 1999
Mumola, Christopher. Veterans in prison or jail. U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2000. HV 9465 .M85 2000
Responding to the challenges of corruption: acts of the International Conference, Milan, 1999. Anna Alvazzi del Frate, Giovanni Pasqua, eds. Milan: UNICRI, HV 5252 .R47 2000
Van Wormer, Katherine. Women and the criminal justice system. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. HV 9950 .V38 2000
Marlene Kandel
LIBRARY HOURS, FALL 2000
Monday - Thursday...............................9am - 10pm
Friday........................................................9am - 5pm
Saturday..................................................12pm - 5pm
Saturday, starting 10/14........................10am - 6pm
Sunday.....................................................12pm - 5pm
11/22.............................................................9am - 8pm
12/9-10, 12/16-17......................................10am - 8pm
12/15.............................................................9am - 8pm
CLOSED: 9/30, 10/1, 10/9, 11/23-24, 12/23-25, 12/29-31
LIBRARY FACULTY
Larry Sullivan, Chief Librarian, 8265,
lesjj@cunyvm
Marvie Brooks, Reference, 8261,
marvie.brooks@jjay.cuny.edu
Jane Davenport, Collection Development, 8236, janedavenport@yahoo.com
Janice Dunham, Associate Librarian for Public Services, 8256, janjj@cunyvm
Nancy Egan, Reference, Interlibrary Loan, 8269, negan@jjay.cuny.edu
Dolores Grande, Serials, 8235, dmgjj@cunyvm
Marlene Kandel, Cataloger, Coordinator for Technical Services, 8237, mkkjj@cunyvm
Katherine Killoran, Reference, Circulation, Library Instruction, 8263, kbkjj@cunyvm
Maria Kiriakova, Reference, 8260,mkiriakova@jjay.cuny.edu
Bonnie Nelson, Associate Librarian for Information Systems, 8267, bnelson@jjay.cuny.edu
Ellen Sexton, Reference, Reserve, 8258, esexton@jjay.cuny.edu
Antony Simpson, Reference, (on leave, spring 2000) 8242, asimpson@jjay.cuny.edu
Han Huang, Vladislav Safyanovskiy, Systems Adjuncts;
Jane Dorfman, Olga François, Jane Greenlaw, James Kuslan, Catherine Stern, Reference Adjuncts
Full-time Support Staff
Dee Dee Aikens: Interlibrary Loan, 8257 Dawn Battle: Cataloging, 8230 Saundra Dancy: Circulation, 8224 Michelle Dutton: Acquisitions, 8230 Anne Kovac, Juana Polanco: Serials, 8230 Circulation: 8225 Reference: 8246 Jane Davenport, Editor
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JOHN
JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE
