Library News Blog
The Lloyd Sealy Library has been offering ebooks since 2001. Our collection of electronic books is very impressive and consists of thousands of titles. Today, everybody would expect ebooks to cause no problems either for librarians or library patrons for a simple reason – they are electronic! There should be no difficulty in accessing and downloading them. Take academic journal articles, for example. After the full-text availability option is established, they are easy to manipulate – print out or download forever on a personal computer. But when it comes to electronic books the access process is not so seamless. Few things have changed in the 15 years since reference librarians first started hearing complaints about the NetLibrary ebooks collections. An ebook would be inaccessible for reading online until 30 minutes after another person finished looking at it on his computer. Simultaneous access would be limited to three people at a time, and when someone wanted to download a whole book, everyone else would have to endure a long wait to get to the book. This nightmare of limited user access is still going on, and there is still no cure offered by the publishers and vendors. Publishers’ search for maximum profit is at odds with libraries’ desire for ease of access, making solutions elusive.
An ebook in a university library environment is just a book. If a print library book is checked out it leaves its place on the shelf and is enjoyed only by one lucky reader for a certain period of time. The same applies to the ebooks – if someone downloads an ebook, it becomes unavailable for everybody else; in other words, the title is checked out virtually and will become accessible only when the ebook is returned (that is, checked in).
Most of the electronic books in the Library’s collection come from two vendors – EBSCOhost and ebrary. When we acquire an ebook, we always look for an unlimited access mode whenever possible, but the publisher’s restrictions or an exorbitant price might prohibit us from doing so.
The rule of thumb is that ebooks bought exclusively by our library (those that indicate John Jay College ownership in the catalog) will have a restricted access in most of the cases – from one to four simultaneous users. Ebooks from EBSCOhost are only available to the John Jay College community. Ebooks from ebrary can be either exclusively used by John Jay’s patrons or belong to a larger, CUNY-wide collection. CUNY-wide ebrary titles will be labeled as CUNY in the catalog. These books have practically no restrictions on the number of users reading and downloading them. As for the John Jay-owned books on the ebrary platform, their access might also be restricted to one to four readers at a time, with a small number having unrestricted access.
Sounds nightmarish, but it is what it is. Believe it or not, things are getting better in the world of ebooks. Both ebrary and EBSCOhost provide user access restriction information in terms of download and printing ability on the title level in the database. Please read these records carefully (it took librarians only a decade to persuade the publishers to make this information available to the end user).
Faculty who would like to assign ebooks from our collection as class readings should first investigate the mode of access (one, several, or an unlimited number of simultaneous users) by either looking at the detailed ebook record in a particular database or by asking librarians for help.
The Library’s online catalog records are managed centrally at the university level and cannot always reflect all the information the librarians would like to display about ebooks. We are working through different university-wide committees to make the ebook records in the catalog more descriptive.
The ebooks universe is still being developed. Librarians always advocate for better ebook access on behalf of students and faculty when meeting with vendors.
Please send an email to mkiriakova@jjay.cuny.edu with any questions or concerns regarding ebooks.
More from the Fall 2015 Library Newsletter »
See also: Recent ebooks acquisitions, Fall 2015
Maria Kiriakova
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 1:19pm
Listed below is a selection of ebooks acquired in the last six months for a significant price from ebrary and EBSCOhost. After each title, there is a note about simultaneous usage (see “Ebooks: A joy or a nightmare?”).
[Note: Links in this blog post will take you to the book records in OneSearch. If the record reads "Full text may be available," find the "EBSCOhost Access for John Jay users" link on the right side of the page.]
Highlights:
Arsovska, J. (2015). Decoding Albanian organized crime: Culture, politics, and globalization. Oakland, California: University of California Press – multiuser access.
The author, Professor Jana Arsovska of John Jay’s Sociology Department, “examines some of the most widespread myths about the so-called Albanian Mafia…[and] presents a comprehensive overview of the causes, codes of conduct, activities, migration, and structure of Albanian organized crime groups in the Balkans, Western Europe, and the United States.” — Publisher's description
Garbarino, J. (2015). Listening to Killers: Lessons Learned From My Twenty Years As a Psychological Expert Witness in Murder Cases. Oakland, California: University of California Press. – Ebsco Ebooks – unlimited user access
“The author offers detailed accounts of how killers travel a path that leads from childhood innocence to lethal violence in adolescence or adulthood. He places the emotional and moral damage of each individual killer within a larger scientific framework of social, psychological, anthropological, and biological research on human development.” — Publisher’s description
Dillon, S. (2015). Wolf-Women and Phantom Ladies: Female Desire in 1940s US Culture. Albany: SUNY Press. – Ebsco Ebooks – unlimited user access
This book consists of “a panoramic survey of 1940s culture that analyzes popular novels, daytime radio serials, magazines and magazine fiction, marital textbooks, Hollywood and educational films, jungle comics, and popular music.” —Publisher’s description
Arrigo, B. (2014). Encyclopedia of criminal justice ethics. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications – 1 user access
Becker, H., Richards, P. (2007). Writing for social scientists how to start and finish your thesis, book, or article (2nd ed., Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing). Chicago: University of Chicago Press - 1 user access
Brooks, T. (2013). Punishment. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge - 3 user access
Brotherton, D. (2015). Youth Street Gangs: A Critical Appraisal. London: Routledge. – Ebsco Ebooks – 3 user access
Eco, U., Farina, G., & Mongiat Farina, C. (2015). How to Write a Thesis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. – Ebsco Ebooks – unlimited user access
Gonzalez, M. & Yanes, M. (2015). Last drop: The politics of water. London: Pluto Press - multiuser access
Hall, R. B. (2014). Reducing Armed Violence with NGO Governance. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. - Ebsco Ebooks – 3 user access
Hamlin, R. (2014). Let Me Be a Refugee: Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – Ebsco Eboks – 1 user access
Heinonen, P. (2011). Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia. New York: Berghahn Books. – Ebsco Ebooks – 3 user access
Ioanide, P. (2015). The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Ebsco Ebooks – 3 user access
Minichiello, V., & Scott, J. G. (2014). Male sex work and society. New York, NY: Harrington Park Press – 1 user
Murphy, J. (2015). Illness or deviance?: Drug courts, drug treatment, and the ambiguity of addiction. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. – 3 user access
Paoli, L. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Organized Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ebsco Ebooks – unlimited user access
Reay, B., Attwood, N., & Gooder, C. (2015). Sex addiction: A critical history. Cambridge, UK: Polity – 3 user access
Salekin, R. T. (2015). Forensic Evaluation and Treatment of Juveniles: Innovation and Best practice. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Ebsco Ebooks – 1 user access
Schenwar, M. (2014). Locked down, locked out: Why prison doesn't work and how we can do better (1st ed.). Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers – multiuser access
Finding ebooks: When searching the CUNY+ Catalog (the Books tab on the Library home page), you will often see the description “electronic resource” in the format column. This most often means it is an ebook. To access it, click on the title or the college name in the availability column and then look for the URL field for a link to the book. You can also use OneSearch. If a title shows “full text available,” you can click on the “view online link” to access the book.
See the Library’s ebook guide for more information.
More from the Fall 2015 Library Newsletter »
Maria Kiriakova
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 1:02pm
The Library’s Special Collections collects Rare Books and Manuscript Collections on criminal justice, broadly defined. We are pleased to announce the following recent acquisitions.
Manuscript Collections recently acquired
The records of the Fortune Society
Approximately 65 boxes of records of the Fortune Society were donated to the Library over this past summer. We are processing the collection now and are happy to report a nearly full run of Fortune News as well as historical correspondence, reports, meeting minutes, publications, and photographs from many of the agency’s offices, programs, and events. Stay tuned for an event and exhibition celebrating the donation of these records. We are now working on processing and describing this collection.
Whitman Knapp files on The Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption
This summer we were given three boxes of files collected by Whitman Knapp as director of the The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption (1970-72) and the City’s Anti-Corruption Procedures, popularly known as the Knapp Commission. We are particularly gratified to find that this collection fills in gaps in our already extensive Knapp Commission Records Collection. We thank Mrs. Ann Knapp for donating these papers to us. A finding aid (PDF) to this collection is available.
From the Broadsides Collection, Lloyd Sealy Library Special Collections.
NYPD – Service and pay cards
This fall we were contacted by the archivist of the New York Transit Museum, looking for a home for ten boxes of NYPD pay cards rescued from their previous location on Jay Street in Brooklyn. As you can see from the sample below, these are pretty mundane items recording pay, service, and retirement records of a sample of officers of presently unknown geographic and chronological scope. However, this collection has potentially great value to genealogy researchers with family members who served in the NYPD. We already have two families eagerly awaiting news about whether their relatives’ cards are in this collection. We will be processing this collection very soon.
Parole Violator, B 5491. Samuel Macey. 1913. From the Broadsides Collection, Lloyd Sealy Library Special Collections.
Three parole violator handbills, Philadelphia
This fall we acquired a set of three early 20th century “Wanted Posters” distributed by the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA. Printed on these 5 x 7 inch sheets of paper are the photographs, prisoner numbers, sentencing details, and physical descriptions (including Bertillon Measurements) of three black parolees named James F. Smith, Samuel Macey, and William H. Wells who all violated parole in 1915. In all three cases, the date of their parole violation is the same as the date of their parole.
A selection from our recently acquired Rare Books
The below selection of new rare books gives a good indication of the range of subjects in which we collect. The first two books are European law books still with their original vellum covers.
1700, Venice. Antonij Concioli, j.c. Cantianensis, Opera omnia. Venetijs: Apud Nicolaum Pezzana.
1705, Venice. De Angelis, Francesco Giuseppe, 1640-1692 Franc. Josephi de Angelis a Scamno Tractatus criminalis de delictis, in tres partes divisus: Cum novo indice titulorum & rerum notabilium. Venetiis: Apud P. Balleonium.
1822, Paris. Guizot, François. De la peine de mort en matière politique. Paris: Béchet aîné ; Rouen : Béchet.
1838, Paris. Brétignères de Courteilles. Les condamnés et les prisons: ou, réforme morale, criminelle et penitentiaire. Paris: Perrotin, Tessier.
1835, New York. Barnard, George G. A full report of the highly interesting breach of promise case: George G. Barnard vs. John J. Gaul and Mary H., his wife, tried before Ogden Edwards, Esquire, one of the circuit judges of the Supreme Court, at the City Hall of New York on the 8th, 9th and 10th days of July, 1835 : containing the whole of the correspondence between the plaintiff and Mrs. Gaul, together with the charge of the judge, and the eloquent speeches of the counsel on both sides. New York: Office of the New-York transcript.
1873, London. Guy. 1773: John Howard, Sheriff of Bedford. London: Henry Renshaw.
1865, London. Saunders, Thomas William. The Prison Act 1865 (28 & 29 Vict. c. 126): Together with an analysis of the Act and the other statutes and sections of statutes relating to prisons still in force. London: H. Cox.
1883, New York. Gray, Landon Carter, M. D. The case of Maggie Keppel, the Brooklyn child-abductor. New York: Reprinted from the American Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1883. [Image on the right scanned from Lloyd Sealy Library's copy.]
1924, New York. Hardie, James. The history of the tread-mill: containing an account of its origin, construction, operation, effects as it respects the health and morals of the convicts, with their treatment and diet; also, a general view of the penitentiary system, with alterations necessary to be introduced into our criminal code, for its improvement. New York: Printed by S. Marks. [Image on the right: Frontispiece detail from copy owned by U.S. National Library of Medicine.]
1934, London. Great Britain. Commission of Inquiry into the Administration of Justice in Kenya, Uganda and the Tanganyika Territory in Criminal Matters. Report of the Commission of inquiry into the administration of Justice in Kenya, Uganda and the Tanganyika Territory in criminal matters, May, 1933 and Correspondence arising out of the report ... London: H.M. Stationery Office.
1953, Turin. Kefauver, Estes. Il gangsterismo in America. Torino: G. Einaudi editore.
1989, New York. New York Lawyers Against the Death Penalty. Memorandum in opposition to S.600/A.1070. New York, New York: New York Lawyers Against the Death Penalty.
To make an appointment to see these or any of our special collections, please contact Ellen Belcher, Special Collections Librarian.
Ellen Belcher
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 12:52pm
In October, METRO Library Council announced that the Library is one of six winners of the 2015-2016 METRO Digitization Grants. Our project, “Digitizing Policing: Opening Access to Law Enforcement Resources,” will make our deep and extensive historical resources on law enforcement and policing available to a wider audience of researchers, students, and law enforcement professionals. The main purpose of this project is to digitize the periodical Law Enforcement News (LEN), and we will be shipping all 636 issues to the Internet Archive for digitization. Over the next year we will also be undertaking other library digitization efforts: rare monographs, serials, pamphlets, and unique archival objects related to the NYPD and other U.S. Police Departments. There are already hundreds of NYPD and law enforcement related digital items in our Digital Collections and on the John Jay College page of the Internet Archive.
Law Enforcement News was continuously published by John Jay College of Criminal Justice from September 1975 through September 2005. In its 30 years of publication, 636 issues were produced. LEN documented developments in police research, policy, and procedure during the last quarter of the 20th century, from which the roots of the current policing environment were shaped. Each issue presented articles that focused on police policy, practice, research, and innovation nationwide. It promoted the sharing of information among law enforcement agencies and the research community. It provided its readers with news, features, and interviews with police chiefs and policy makers. Although the paper published opinion pieces from readers, it did not publish editorials of its own, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. It did not report on crime per se, but it did report on police response to crime. For example, it covered community policing, “broken windows,” and CompStat in their infancies and continued to report on these trends as they made their way throughout the nation.
In the intervening years, the Library has regularly and frequently been contacted by police officers and researchers asking for copies of articles. The Library-hosted LEN web page offers only very limited excerpts and selections. Even so, this web page received 4,500+ hits so far in 2015, indicating that people are still looking for LEN articles. Since 1981, LEN has been indexed by Criminal Justice Periodical Index (ProQuest). Most articles remain inaccessible to the original user base – law enforcement professionals – who are traditionally without access to library resources. We have also heard from libraries supporting new criminal justice programs who would like to include LEN in their collections, but they are neither interested nor financially able to purchase the title in its only available format, microfilm.
Contemporary policing methods and philosophies are (rightly) coming under greater public scrutiny. The intended audiences and end users of these materials include academic researchers studying the policing history of the United States, journalists, students, law enforcement professionals, and interested members of the general public. We cannot accurately foresee how people will use these materials, but we have no doubt that if we build it, they will come. We look forward to providing this material to a wider audience by making it fully open access for all.
We thank Marie Simonetti Rosen, Publisher of LEN, for her assistance on the grant application and for her continuing support of this project.
Ellen Belcher
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 12:46pm
The Library was happy to host two of Lloyd Sealy’s great-grandchildren, Rochelle, 17, and Aaron (AJ), 15, when they toured the Library this summer. It was the high school students’ first trip to New York City from their home in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. During their visit, they were introduced to news of their great-grandfather, shared stories not previously documented, and reviewed photos from Lloyd Sealy’s life, some of which also hang on walls at home. Rochelle and AJ said their Sealy Library visit was the best part of their trip East.
Janice Dunham
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 12:44pm
Some article links may require a John Jay login to view.
Ellen Belcher presented “Breaking the String: Losing Beads in Tight Places” at the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group Annual Conference at New York University in May. This paper featured an ongoing contemporary archaeology research project she has undertaken called “Lost Ornaments of New York,” which can be viewed on the web at lostornaments.tumblr.com.
Marta Bladek’s article, “Mapping Grief and Memory in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,” was published in Biography (37.4). She also reviewed Elena Gorokhova’s Russian Tattoo and Christina Nichol’s Waiting for Electricity (“Staying Home or Leaving It,” Women’s Review of Books, 32.4) and Seth Bruggeman’s Born in the U.S.A. in South Atlantic Review (78.3/4). In addition to her scholarly productivity, Prof. Bladek has contributed a new person to the world: Baby Conrad was born on September 27.
Kathleen Collins published “Food TV” in The Sage Encyclopedia of Food Issues (2015), a review of Su Holmes’ The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (92.2) and presented “Lending Our Ears: The Evolution of Vicarious Therapy from Radio to Podcasting” at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference at Colby-Sawyer College in October.
Robin Davis published two columns in Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian ("Teaching the Network: A Brief Demonstration of the Internet's Structure for Information Literacy Instruction," 34.2 and "Git and GitHub for Librarians," 34.3) and co-presented “The Library Outpost: Modules, Templates, and Outreach in Blackboard” at the Northeast Connect Conference with Helen Keier.
Jeffrey Kroessler presented on the panel, “A People’s History of Resiliency,” at the Future of Affordable Homeownership in NYC, a conference sponsored by the Center for NYC Neighborhoods. He was also on the panel, “Preserving our Architectural History: The Business Case for Landmarks Preservation,” sponsored by the Landmarks50 Alliance.
Finally, we are happy to welcome Daisy Dominguez, Stefka Tzanova, and Zuwang Shen as adjunct librarians this semester.
Posted Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 12:41pm
The Library homepage has been slightly updated for the Fall semester. You'll notice that we've made OneSearch easier to access from the Articles, Books, and Media tabs. Moreover, Books and Media are now separate tabs — much more intuitive!
Except for media search, the normal functionality in each tab should remain the same. OneSearch is an added option.
(Still want to search for media in CUNY+? You can do this by selecting "Classic CUNY+ Catalog" in the Media tab box, but be aware that not all videos available in OneSearch are included in CUNY+.)
What's OneSearch? OneSearch helps you find print books, ebooks, articles, videos, reference works, and more resources available through the John Jay Library or CUNY. It all starts with one search!
OneSearch is a great place to turn to when you need the fastest, simplest way to get library resources on a topic. (However, OneSearch is not comprehensive. You'll find many, but not all, of the articles you have access to through John Jay's library databases.) OneSearch is especially useful for finding an item by title.
More information:
- When should I use OneSearch?
- How do I use OneSearch? (video tutorial)
- Brief technical details & history
—
September 3, 2015
Posted Thursday, September 3, 2015 - 12:07pm
… wherein faculty share a favorite book with the rest of us.
Bonus material from the Spring 2015 Newsletter
Hannah Howell is the author of fifteen Highland.... romance novels about the Murray clan, published 1988-2015 by various publishers.
An eminent full professor at John Jay, who prefers anonymity, relaxes from the rigors of scholarly work with Hannah Howell’s novels, reading and re-reading them. Our professor recommends them to you, especially Howell’s fifteen titles about the Murrays in 15th century Scotland. The latest is Highland Guard (2015) which falls into the usual format: noble warrior who’s a wonderful, thoughtful lover, an independent, intelligent, beautiful princess, hot explicit sex, loyal servants, a demesne managed with kind care for all inhabitants, a dire threat to the good guys, and the threat overcome.
Howell is wonderful at creating likable characters and odious villains with a few deft descriptions, and then working it all out in action. These knights can cut off a head with a flick of the wrist. In Highland Warrior, there’s comic relief in personality traits, in children, and in unlikely animal behavior. Religion and the local priest are present only when there’s going to be a marriage, usually when the hot knight gets the hot lady and they fall in love. One obstacle to their love, in addition to armies at the gate, is always the question Does he really love me or is it just great sex? Sound familiar? Though Howell’s Highland settings are medieval, the characters and their concerns are contemporary. Our informant advises men to read these novels for their how-to content.
Comments solicited by Janice Dunham
Posted Thursday, May 14, 2015 - 1:28pm
From the Spring 2015 Newsletter
Faculty and content creators often have questions about using copyrighted text in their work. The use of visual images in teaching or writing about art raises a particular set of fair use and copyright issues that need to be considered. The College Art Association recently addressed these issues with the February 2015 release of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. The code includes questions and guidelines about invoking fair use in analytic writing, teaching about art, making art and providing access to archival collections. This up-to-date code, authored by lead investigators Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide, professors of Law and Communication Studies respectively at American University, in consultation with practitioners in the field, joins a growing list of best practices in various fields including documentary film, poetry, dance, online video, journalism and academic and research libraries. The codes help guide users of copyrighted material to make their own well-informed decisions about how and what they can use based on the Fair Use section of U.S. copyright law. They also help inform judges – in the case of a legal action – about common practice within a given discipline. The visual arts code as well many others can be found online at the Center for Media and Social Impact (cmsimpact.org).
Kathleen Collins
Posted Thursday, May 14, 2015 - 1:24pm
From the Spring 2015 Newsletter
Applying for tenure or promotion? Consult the Library resource guide
Kathleen Collins
Faculty members preparing their personnel action applications for tenure and promotion are reminded that the library offers a resource and information guide, “Faculty Scholarship Resources,” found in the Subject Guides link from the library home page. The guide includes information on citation analysis, journal ranking, qualitative assessments and altmetrics (alternative ways of measuring the impact of scholarly work). While the process of collecting this information for inclusion in the college’s application forms and self-evaluation narratives is not a simple, one-stop process, the guide can offer tips on finding such information as well as a helpful way to put the emphasis on qualitative and quantitative assessments in context.
Find this guide on the Library’s website or at guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/citation.
Stop and frisk: the back story
Jeffrey A. Kroessler
The recent controversy over stop and frisk and the NYPD’s aggressive response to relatively minor offenses has engendered criticism of the “Broken Windows” approach to policing (first articulated by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in The Atlantic in March 1982). How did the NYPD come to adopt this practice? Two interviews in “Justice in New York: An Oral History” provide some insight. John Timoney was appointed Chief of Department by Commissioner Bill Bratton in 1994, and when he became First Deputy Commissioner, Louis Anemone became Chief of Department.
To read the transcripts of their interviews, read through Justice in New York: an Oral History on our Digital Collections. And if you are interested in police corruption, look at the interviews with Joseph Armao, counsel to the Mollen Commission, Judge Harold Baer, member of the Mollen Commission, and Michael Armstrong, counsel to the Knapp Commission.
#Stacksplorations: social media in the stacks
Robin Davis
We ‘gram. We post. We tweet. We’re regrammed, reposted, retweeted. We share and we are shared.
The Library loves social media! This semester, we’re showing off gems from the stacks to encourage students to take a walk through our shelves and find a book that calls out to them. Follow our #stacksplorations on Instagram and Twitter at @johnjaylibrary and on our Facebook page.
Posted Thursday, May 14, 2015 - 1:20pm