 |
 |
|
|
 JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE LLOYD SEALY LIBRARY |
|||
|
|||
| Classified Information The Library Newsletter Volume 10, Number 2 Spring 1998 |
|||
|
|||
CONTENTS: |
From the Desk of the Chief Librarian
|
||
 |
|||
From the Desk of the Chief Librarian The New York City homicide rate may be declining, but Sealy Library is awash in murders. George Abbott stalked and shot Christie Warden after she rejected him as a suitor. Based on forensic evidence differentiating horse and human blood, Leavitt Alley was acquitted of the murder of a body found in a barrel floating in a river. Sarah Barber and her nineteen-year-old lover were convicted of the death of Mrs. Barber's husband. No, these are not library staffers or any of our patrons, but actors in lurid nineteenth-century accounts of murder trials. The public's curiosity about gruesome murders was as high then as now. To enrich our resources in the history of murder and legal wizardry (or incompetence), we recently acquired a splendid historical collection on American and British trials. Historical accounts of crime and criminal trials have an important place in any criminal justice collection, giving the holdings a richness not found in the latest statistical or legal analyses of crime. They also provide essential background for current research. Similarly, we collect editions of the classics in criminology. To fulfill this purpose we acquired a rare German edition of Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man. Having such works in John Jay’s collections once again highlights our preeminence in the world of criminal justice research. These notable acquisitions do not diminish the continuing development of our regular print and electronic collections. In our criminal justice print collections we have added numerous foreign periodical titles as well as foreign government reports. In sum, the collection keeps growing and expanding in all areas of the criminal justice field. On a personal note, I am pleased that my exhibition “Inside Editions: A Literature of Punishment” has been on display in John Jay’s Atrium Gallery after a two-month run at the Grolier Club of New York. Featuring ca. 125 pieces from my own collection of convict literature and art, the show chronicles the history of American convict literature from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century to the present. Larry Sullivan
Expanding the Collection: Journals Do you need journals that Sealy Library doesn’t own in hard copy? Our collection has been broadened considerably since many such journals have become available to us electronically, providing instant full-text articles through the Internet. Along with several other colleges in the University, this library is testing some electronic services that deliver journal articles directly to WWW computers in the college. Project Muse is available from Website http://muse.jhu.edu. Muse journal titles are cataloged in CUNY+ with the notation “datafile.” Project Muse includes forty journals in the humanities and social sciences going back three to eight years. Sample titles include the first electronic-only journal, Postmodern Culture, as well as World Politics and Theatre Journal. The CUNY Library Services Office will sign a contract this semester for the full-text delivery of articles from the Information Access Searchbank. You can try this Web product now by clicking on “Electronic Resources” from our Homepage: http:www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu. Searchbank contains four databases: business journals, scholarly journals, popular magazines, and health journals. The scholarly journals include those in social science, the humanities, communications, and general science. Another product, Wilson Omni Select, is available for testing in March through the “Electronic Resources” button on our homepage, or from home computers at http://wilsonweb2.hwwilson.com/autologin When accessing Wilson Omni Select from home, use CUNY as the user name and wilson as the password. Wilson Omni Select includes 500 journals in full-text and others in abstract form. It is good for biographical material, and for science, social science and humanities journals. UNIVerse is a new product from Lexis-Nexis. It will be on trial from March 17 to May 16. Watch The Week Of and the JJCNet-L list for the password, or call us at 237-8246. UNIVerse searches major newspapers, wire services, broadcasts, and current legal materials. Coverage is not as complete as the familiar Lexis-Nexis, but the search engine is easier to use. Janice Dunham
Fire Science Databases on the Web Fire Science and Emergency Management have not had an indexing/abstracting source since 1987, presenting problems for researchers, especially those seeking journal articles. Two government agencies are now using the World Wide Web to remedy this situation by providing free access to two databases of Fire Science materials. The Learning Resource Center at the National Fire Academy and the Emergency Management Institute has made its Online Card Catalog (OCC) accessible to the public via the Web. The catalog includes bibliographic citations and some abstracts to journal articles as well as to books, research reports, government documents, and conference proceedings. The materials collected by the Learning Resource Center are intended for an audience of fire service personnel, emergency managers, and first responders. The collection focuses on statistics, management, policy, and training, with some technically-oriented material. It is an extremely useful source for John Jay students. http://www.lrc.fema.gov FIREDOC is a more technically-oriented database on the Web which is produced by the Building and Fire Research Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This database indexes the publications that the Laboratory publishes, which can be in the form of journal articles, research reports or conference papers. FIREDOC is used internationally as a source for material related to fire science, building construction and materials, and fire safety engineering. http://flame.cfr.nist.gov/fire/runfiredoc.html Once materials have been identified using these databases, check to see if the Library owns them by looking them up in CUNY+ (DPAC). The Sealy Library does subscribe to the major fire science journals and collects extensively in the areas of emergency management, hazardous materials, fire service management, and fire safety. Materials found in the Learning Resource Center catalog may be borrowed through interlibrary loan. An instruction sheet with details about how to search each database is available at the Reference Desk. Both of these databases can be accessed from the Sealy Library’s Home Page under Electronic Resources - Internet Information Resources - Fire Science. http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu. Kathy Killoran
Have you checked out the Library’s World Wide Web site lately? It can be found on the Internet at http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu. Our webmaster Matt Ransford gave our homepage a new look last fall, and we are continuing to add resources to the site. A new description of the Library’s Special Collections, written by Marilyn Lutzker before her retirement, can be found at http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/info/speccoll/. New publications have been added to the Research Guides section, including Ellen Sexton’s The Native Americans of North America: A Research Guide for the Lloyd Sealy Library, Nancy Egan’s Asian and Asian American Criminal Justice and Legal Studies, and the Library’s familiar APA Style Guide and Outlining handouts. Future research guides will continue to be included on the Website. The Library’s collection of links to important Internet Information Sources in Criminal Justice and other mission areas continues to grow. A section on Fire Science resources has been added as well as one on Domestic Violence. The “What’s New” section will highlight significant new resources as they are added. These can all be found under “Electronic Resources” on our homepage Also new on the Website is the tribute to Lloyd Sealy that was written by Gerald Markowitz at the time of the dedication of the Lloyd Sealy Library. It has been supplemented with photos from the Sealy collection in the Library’s archives, and it can be accessed directly from the homepage. We are eager for feedback on our Website. While we hope it will be a useful resource for the whole Internet community, our primary constituency is the John Jay College community, and we want to meet your needs. If you have any suggestions for our site, please contact us. Bonnie Nelson
A number of college and university libraries in the United States are now supplementing their traditional Reserve Room collections with electronic reserve systems. Documents are stored in electronic form on a central computer connected to a school’s network. Students can view the documents on personal computers connected to the network, either reading the papers on-screen, downloading them to a disk, or printing them out. The advantages include an end to missing and disorganized pages, no more making of multiple photocopies, and access to the reserve material potentially unlimited by time or student numbers. However, students must have easy access to sufficient numbers of computers and printers in order to use the system effectively. There is another complication -- the library must comply with copyright law, an area of law which is spectacularly unclear regarding electronic reserves. Some libraries have solved this problem by storing only non-copyrighted materials on their electronic reserve systems. Almost all libraries limit access to materials to the students in a particular class. Some libraries pay copyright fees. The Lloyd Sealy Library does not at present have an electronic reserve system, but we hope to set one up in the future. First, we must establish the library’s electronic copyright policy while the college keeps increasing access to computers. The library is investing in the minimum hardware needed to establish a pilot program, and we hope to start experimenting at some stage during 1998. For anyone interested in the murky area of copyright law, there is an informative and humorous Internet site at http://www.nmjc.cc.nm.us/copyrightbay/coprbay.htm. Another site maintained by Columbia University lists links to many other copyright sites, many of which contain information directly relevant to electronic reserves, at http://www.cc.columbia.edu/~rosedale. Ellen Sexton
In the fall 1997 semester, the Resource and Research Center on Domestic Violence here at John Jay College formed a library subcommittee in order to facilitate research in the area of domestic violence. So far, the library has added a domestic violence subject directory to its Internet homepage, produced a lengthy in-house publication: The Police Response to Spouse Abuse: An Annotated Bibliography, and ordered or acquired several new publications for the library collection. These include several dissertations pertaining to multicultural aspects of the issue. In order to further promote research and to strengthen the library’s already extensive collection in the area of domestic violence, we welcome acquisitions suggestions or donated materials on the subject, as well as any suggestions for programs or projects. Nancy Egan
Encyclopedia of applied ethics. Ruth Chadwick, ed. San Diego: Academic Press, Fisher, Joseph C. Killer Among us: public reactions to serial murder. Westport, CT: Fischkin, Barbara. Muddy cup: a Dominican family comes to age in a new America. Forensic taphonomy: the postmortem fate of human remains. W.D. Haglund, M. Great world trials. Edward Knappman, ed. Detroit: Gale, 1997. K540 .G74 1997 The Latino Encyclopedia. B. & R. Chabran, eds. NY: M. Cavendish, 1996. Ref. Lefkowitz, Bernard. Our guys: the Glen Ridge rape and the secret life of the perfect Lemert, Edwin M. The trouble with evil: social control at the edge of morality. Min, Pyong Gap. Caught in the middle: Korean merchants in America’s Peters, C.J. Virus Hunter: thirty years of battling hot viruses around the world. Race, law, and culture: perspectives on Brown v. Board of Education. Austin Sarat, Schneid, Thomas. Fire and emergency law casebook. Albany: Delmar, 1997. Shenk, David. Data smog: surviving the information glut. San Francisco: Spongberg, Mary. Feminizing venereal disease: the body of the prostitute in Walmsley, Roy. Prison populations in Europe and North America: some Walters, James W. What is a person? An ethical exploration. Urbana: U. Illinois Yablonsky, Lewis. Gangsters: fifty years of madness, drugs, and death on the Marlene Kandel
This year’s Library Benefit Book Sale will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 5 and 6 in the Theatre Lobby. Hours will be from noon to 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday and noon to 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday. As always, many wonderful bargains will be there for students, faculty and staff to scoop up. If you have books to donate to the sale, please bring them to the Library Circulation Desk, clearly marked “Book Sale,” by Monday, April 27. We also need faculty volunteers to help run the sale. Any questions may be directed to Jane Davenport at x8236.
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 |