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 JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE LLOYD SEALY LIBRARY |
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| Classified Information The Library Newsletter Volume 10, Number 1 Fall 1997 |
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CONTENTS: |
From the Desk of the Chief Librarian
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From the Desk of the Chief Librarian During the June commencement exercises, as we expressed our farewell sentiments to John Jay graduates, we also extended the annual welcome to the incoming, transient Eberhardini -- a variety of wandering scholar who is probably the last vestige of our less complicated medieval academic heritage -- who make their way from state to state and country to country, researching their specialties. Sealy Library once again saw an influx of these scholars in need of our unparalleled resources. These resources have grown considerably, thanks to a munificent infusion of funds at the end of the spring semester, and our visiting scholars did not go away disappointed. We were able to continue building our international criminal justice holdings, provide additional support for forensic science and the humanities, and maintain a steady course in our general collections. While college activity may look subdued during the summer, the library was even more active than usual. Book trucks overflowing with new titles lined the aisles of technical services, computers waited to be installed, and new electronic resources were loaded on computers. Our busy summer prepared us for the autumnal season that paradoxically brings quiescence to nature but stimulates an active reawakening of campus life. A record number of students enrolled in the college, students who immediately began their acquaintance with our collections and services. Fortunately, we reinforced not only our collections and automation stock but also our public service faculty. We are pleased to have two new librarians: Nancy Egan and Ellen Sexton. Both have already done time on substitute lines but now are on the track towards tenure. We extend them a warm welcome, as we wish Marilyn Lutzker all the best in her retirement. Larry Sullivan
The Library classroom now has 24 PCs and an instructor’s workstation with an overhead projector. All PCs are on the library network and have access to the full range of the library’s electronic systems, as well as being loaded with WordPerfect 5.2 and 6.1 and Netscape Navigator, for access to the World Wide Web. The classroom supports the college’s academic programs in three principal ways, in the following order of priority: 1: Library classes: Taught by librarians at the request of individual instructors, these are tailored to specific databases or class assignments. They are scheduled several weeks in advance and are given only during the first ten weeks of the semester (until November 7, this fall). 2: Class meetings: These are taught by the course instructor in courses involving some electronic component. Limited access to the classroom can be provided for this purpose. Scheduling well ahead of time is recommended. 3: Use of the classroom as a computer lab: For limited hours beginning November 8, all facilities of the classroom (including the two linked printers) will be accessible to individual students. A weekly sign-up sheet will be posted on the classroom door. Users must provide their own disks. Computer Lab staff will provide only basic technical assistance. Availability of the room for lab purposes will be subject to the needs of the classes which need to be taught in the room. Appointments for library classes and for other uses of the classroom can be made by calling Tony Simpson at ext. 8242. Tony Simpson
Fraud, murder, new technology and a jilted lover are just some of the things Ainsley C. Armstrong dealt with during his four decades with the Boston Police Department. The papers of this former Deputy Superintendent who joined the police force in 1891 are now available. The library acquired them last summer, and they’ve now been listed and described in a guide to their use. This detailed descriptive guide will soon be available at the library’s web site; a paper version is now available in the Special Collections Room. Superintendent Armstrong spent the bulk of his career with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. His papers illustrate the work of the Bureau during the first three decades of the twentieth century. A scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the Albany Penitentiary dating from 1872 to 1879 were acquired with the Armstrong papers. These clippings, taken mostly from Albany newspapers, cover the last year of the Penitentiary’s superintendency by Amos Pilsbury and the subsequent administration of his son Louis Dwight Pilsbury. The papers are notable for their coverage of the 1872 International Prison Reform Congress attended in London by Amos Pilsbury as well as a later controversy which erupted over the use of prison labor in the Albany Penitentiary. Ellen Sexton
Finding Consumer Health Information Over the summer, the Library has improved its coverage of health topics. Five new periodicals have been ordered, including several years of back issues for each. These titles are Nutrition Reviews, the Physician & Sportsmedicine, American Family Physician, Health (San Francisco, CA), and Public Health Reports. These additions, all of which are indexed in the Library’s DPER periodical database, should make it easier for members of the John Jay community to gather consumer health information. The World Wide Web is an important source of consumer health information as well. The federal government has produced a search engine exclusively for consumer health information called healthfinder. Healthfinder is designed to identify online publications, support and self-help groups, databases, organizations, and other Web sites that produce reliable health information for the public. At the reference desk you may pick up a new Library handout on consumer health which provides instructions for using healthfinder as well as a list of the major consumer health sites. One of the major sites is NOAH (New York Online Access to Health), which is being produced cooperatively by New York librarians under a grant received by the CUNY Office of Library Services (http://www.noah.cuny.edu).
The interlibrary loan/faculty information services unit is now being supervised by Nancy Egan. Policies will remain the same, except that all inquiries as well as E-mail requests for materials (containing full bibliographic citations) should now be directed to Nancy at nanjj@cunyvm.cuny.edu. As part of its faculty information services, the interlibrary loan department can help faculty set up an account with Carl Uncover. For $25.00 a year, this database service will E-mail to you on a timely basis the tables of contents of up to fifty journals of your choosing and provide citations pertinent to your particular research needs. If you would like a demonstration of Carl Uncover or need more information regarding interlibrary loan policies, you may contact Nancy Egan or stop by the reference desk.
Moving Into the Digital Future We all look forward to a day when our home or office computer may bring us from afar the research and teaching materials we need, cheaply and in full text. The digital future is not born all at once but is being pieced together little by little. The Sealy Library is happy to to be able to supply the pieces as they appear. The following is a brief summary of John Jay’s current availability of remote resources. Westlaw, a comprehensive full-text database of legal materials, is now available to faculty for home or office use with a new password that can be used at any time of day or night. Project Muse is a collection of full-text periodical articles from more than forty journals in humanities, social sciences and mathematics produced by Johns Hopkins. Date coverage is primarily the last three years. Muse journals can be accessed via the Library homepage at http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu or from any College Internet computer at http://muse.jhu.edu/ FirstSearch is a collection of seventeen databases, most notably FastDoc, which supplies articles full text to your e-mail address, and NetFirst, a comprehensive index to Web sites. FirstSearch is available only through October, but if faculty feedback is positive the University may underwrite its acquisition. FirstSearch can be accessed from the Library homepage or from any Internet -equipped college computer at Encyclopedia Britannica, full text with Web hot buttons, is available from the Library homepage or from any college Internet computer at http://www.eb.com CUNY+, the Library catalog, is primarily an index to sources. It is available from all CUNY home and office computers and it includes an increasing number of databases. The additional databases are accessed from screens two, three and four following the initial CUNY+ screen. Books in Print (BIP) is particularly useful, but others include Dissertation Abstracts (DDIS), Biography Index (BIOG), Education (ERIC), Current Contents (CURA), Art Index (ARTI), and Book Review Digest (BKRV). The additional databases use the same commands as the familiar DPAC, DPER, and DNEW. We in the Sealy Library are always testing new possibilities for full text delivery. If you are interested in a specific product or type of service, please tell us. Janice Dunham
The Library reference area now has twelve Pentium computers available for student, faculty, and staff use. All of these are equipped with sound boards and headphones and may be used to access the World Wide Web, CUNY+, or any of the Library’s CD-ROMs:
CD-ROM Indexes and Abstracts: Criminal Justice Abstracts, 1968- Nat. Criminal Justice Reference Service Database PsycLIT (Psychological Abstracts), 1974- Sociofile (Sociological Abstracts), 1974- PAIS Public Affairs Index 1972-(new Spring 1997) MLA Bibliography, 1963- (new Fall 1997) America: History and Life, 1964- (new Fall 1997) Philosopher’s Index, 1940- (new Fall 1997)
CD-Rom Full-Text Resources: Encarta 97 Encyclopedia (new, Spring 1997) Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (new) Constitution Papers Politics in America, 1998 (new) Encyclopedia of Careers (new, Spring 1997) Multimedia Guide to Occupational Exploration (new, Spring 1997) 1990 Census of New York State Food Analyst Plus New York Code of Rules and Regulations (new) Four of the new PCs were provided through a grant funded by the New York State Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act. Bonnie Nelson
Two new Library research publications are now available. The first, entitled “The Police Response to Spouse Abuse” is an annotated bibliography of literature published on the topic since 1984. Listings of major papers from criminal justice, social science, and women studies scholars are annotated, and the various authors' recommendations as to the appropriate police response to these incidents are presented. The bibliography serves as a guide and finding aid, as all the annotations represent items in the Library's collection and all respective Library locations are provided. Also available is a research guide entitled “Asian & Asian-American Criminal Justice and Legal Studies”. This guide provides citations and brief annotations to items in the Library's reference collection. In addition, the guide describes how to use various paper indexes, electronic databases, world wide web sources, and other libraries in the metropolitan area which have extensive collections in the field. Nancy Egan
The Library was the recipient of some generous gifts during the past year. The Student Government and the Alumni Association made donations which enabled the library to accept a gift from the state of $8,000 which had to be matched. Gifts were also received from The Puerto Rican Studies Association and the Lambda club. Because of the College and University windfall book funds received at the end of the fiscal year, the Library was able to buy some large new reference book sets, necessitating a major shift of the Reference stacks. We are quickly running out of space for books, so we ask everyone’s patience as we try to shift books around to make the best of the space we presently have. Jane Davenport
Scheub, Harold. The tongue is fire: South Africa storytellers and apartheid. U. African Writers. NY: Scribner, 1997. Ref. PL8010 .A453 1997 Toro Sugranes, Jose. Diccionario de la historia y lacultura de Puerto Rico. Hato The Dictionary of art. 34 vols. Jane Turner, ed. Grove's Dictionaries, 1996. 34 v. Comprehensive toxicology. 13 vols I. Glenn Sipes, Charlene A. McQueen, A. Jay Hall, Charles J. A chronicle of American music, 17001995. NY: Schirmer Books, Ferriss, Susan. The fight in the fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers The Latino encyclopedia. Richard Chabran and Rafael Chabran, eds. NY: Marshall Thomas, Brook. American literary realism and the failed promise of contract. Black chant: languages of AfricanAmerican postmodernism. NY: Cambridge U.P, Wolf, Leonard. Dracula : the connoisseur’s guide. NY: Broadway Books, c1997. Hagen, Lyman B. Heart of a woman, mind of a writer, and soul of a poet: a Trace, Arther S. Literature: its opponents and its power. Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press Waters, Karen Volland. The perfect gentleman: masculine control in Victorian The play of terror in nineteenthcentury France. Newark: U.Delaware Pr., 1997. Marlene Kandel
Monday - Thursday....................................9am-10pm
Larry Sullivan, Chief Librarian, 8265, lesjj@cunyvm
Full-time Support Staff Dee Dee Aikens: Interlibrary Loan, 8257 Circulation: 8225
Editor: Jane Davenport |