From the Desk of the Chief Librarian

Some years ago I wrote in this newsletter of our acquisition of the 1833 first French edition of the classic work by the Frenchmen Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont on the prisons of the United States. This influential book inspired fellow countrymen, Frédéric-Auguste Demetz and G. Abel Blouet to make their own survey of prisons in the mid-1830s. Demetz was a judge who worked on separating juvenile offenders from more hardened criminals by founding the farm colony of Mettray, near Tours, France in 1840. Blouet, an influential architect, was the first scholar to bring up the question of the contemporary painting of Greek sculptures. After their visit to the United States, Demetz and Blouet wrote the extensive Rapports à m. le comte de Montalivet..Ministre Secrétaire de l’État…sur les pénitenciers des États-Unis (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1837). This work was a much more in-depth study of American prisons than that of de Tocqueville and de Beaumont. Furthermore, Blouet provided a number of architectural and other drawings for prisons in each state surveyed, including fine representations of New York’s Auburn and Sing Sing penitentiaries. The Demetz and Blouet study collected much diverse information on the American prison system and its publication led directly to major reform in European prison management and design.

We were pleased to have recently acquired a fine first edition of this work with plates in very good condition. I am happy to say that ours is a presentation copy from Demetz, while he was at Mettray, to Edward Hartshorne, the resident physician at the Cherry Hill penitentiary, one of the prisons surveyed in the book. This book is a most welcome addition to our collection of classics in criminal justice; it lends more weight to our research reputation, and underlines our commitment to the study of criminal justice in both American and international contexts.

I am also pleased to announce the addition to our faculty of Associate Professor Jeffrey Kroessler. Jeffrey came to us from the College of Staten Island and is the author of a number of works on New York history.

Larry E. Sullivan

JOHN JAY IN HIS OWN WORDS:

The Papers of John Jay Image Database

The Papers of John Jay is an editing project at Columbia University which has spent many years compiling copies of John Jay correspondence from several repositories. This collection has now been put on line at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/jay/.

Here you can search by date, correspondent or subject. You can see the letters in the original (and discover that John Jay’s handwriting is very difficult to read), or in transcription. This is an ongoing project; future plans include adding more images to the database and publishing the correspondence in a multi-volume series.

Ellen Belcher

NEW AND CHANGED DATABASES

Over the summer the Lloyd Sealy Library added five new databases to our collection and one existing database changed its appearance:

AnthroSource, from the American Anthropological Association, includes current issues of eleven of the AAA's most critical peer-reviewed publications, plus a complete electronic archive of all AAA journals through 2003. (Paid for by the John Jay Student Technology Fee).

ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts), indexes 650 journals in health, social services, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations and education from 1987. (Provided by CUNY).

DSM-IV-TR. The Sealy Library now has an online subscription to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders through a company called Stat!Ref. DSM-IV is the standard diagnostic tool used by mental health professionals. (Paid for by the John Jay Student Technology Fee).

Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center is a one-stop source for information on social issues, aimed at lower-division undergraduates. Use it to access viewpoint articles, topic overviews, statistics, primary documents, links to websites, and full-text magazine and newspaper articles. (Provided by CUNY).