Library News Blog

Ellen Sexton

We have just started subscribing to Academic Videos Online (AVON), the most extensive product curated by Alexander Street Press, a vendor that licenses video collections to university libraries. AVON contains 66,000 titles from multiple disciplines and in diverse formats: documentaries, feature films, lectures, news programs, and more. The metadata describing each video is detailed and includes abstracts and subject headings. Most (but not all) of the videos are closed-captioned in English.

Design

AVON videos are accessed via two user interfaces: the ProQuest search interface and the Alexander Street platform.

The ProQuest interface consists of an index with descriptive metadata and just a tiny thumbnail image of the video. The thumbnail image links to the video itself, which is hosted by Alexander Street on their platform.

This is an unusual construction for a database, but the ProQuest search interface alleviates significant aesthetic and functional problems with the Alexander Street platform. Searching the metadata on the ProQuest interface is many times quicker than on the Alexander Street platform. (Unfortunately, there is no easy link back to the ProQuest search engine from the Alexander Street platform, but perhaps that is something they will eventually add.)

Discovery

The fastest and most efficient way of searching for videos by title or by specific topic is by way of the ProQuest search layer. The advanced search is especially powerful: searches can be limited by document type, language, and publication date. Word searches can be narrowed to specific record fields, including title, subject, location, person, etc.

All of the metadata is also harvested and shared with the library’s main discovery tool, OneSearch. Restricting OneSearch results to Resource type: Audio visual makes for more efficient searching and will search video content from multiple vendors.

The best way of browsing by discipline is on the Alexander Street Platform—slow, but it works.

Content

There’s a substantial amount of more obviously educational material. Documentaries, archival footage, news programs, training materials, music performances, and lectures typically appear in search results. Many are short enough to show in their entirety during one undergraduate course period and still have time for discussion.

AVON includes content previously packaged for us as American History in Video and Criminal Justice & Public Safety in Video. The easiest way to browse content from either of these collections is to navigate via the discipline headings on the Alexander Street platform—for instance, Social Sciences » Criminal Justice & Public Safety.

The feature film content is astonishingly good, though not easy to browse. It is discoverable using the ProQuest interface by limiting the search to results tagged with the document type “performances.” Or search for the name of a distributor, or a particular award. Some films that caught my eye include, from distributor Kino Lorber, The Return (2003), City of Life and Death (2009), and Happy Together (1997).

From Music Box films we get Ida (2014), Seraphine (2008), Viva Riva (2011), Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012).

From Sony Pictures Classics, we get Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) (2002), Persepolis (2007), Made in Dagenham (2010), 12 (2007), Frozen River (2008), Volver (2006), Waltz With Bashir (2008), The Triplets of Belleville (2003), Sunshine State (2002), Friends with Money (2006), Breakfast on Pluto (2005), House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Raid: Redemption (2012), and The Tango Lesson (1997).

Also notable are We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Bicho de Sete Cabeças (2000), and many award-winning movies from the Middle East, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, South and East Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Early film is represented in the collection with titles from Edison and Ford, The Battleship Potemkin, and other silent classics. An interesting micro-collection is the 13-title Pioneers of African-American Cinema.

Award-winning documentaries include The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), The Fog of War (2003), Call Me Kuchu (2012), Crumb (1994), Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002), Beirut Diaries (2006), 33 Days (2007), My Millennial Life (2016), Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2010), When the Bough Breaks (2001), Cinema Komunisto (2010), Happy Valley (2014), After Tiller (2013). Also present are Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2016), New York: The Green Revolution (2013), (un)veiled: Muslim Women Talk About Hijab (2007), The Devil Came on Horseback (2007).

Beware...

For best results, use a recent version of Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Firefox. Videos will not play in Safari, including Safari for iOS devices.

The Alexander Street platform is slow to load content. This is especially noticeable when going from the ProQuest interface to the video, and when playing videos off-campus. It does take time for the video to buffer initially before playing. Patience and consciously restraining from clicking pay off. We have been assured by the vendor that there are plans in motion to substantially improve the appearance and functionality of the Alexander Street platform. Until then, the best approach is to use the ProQuest layer for searching, and browse and view the videos on the Alexander Street platform. The quality of the content mitigates the imperfections of the user interface.

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Ellen Sexton

We now subscribe to the Docuseek2 Compete Collection of documentaries and social issues films. The content comes from Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films (including The Fanlight Collection and dGenerate Films), Kartemquin Films, MediaStorm, the National Film Board of Canada, Scorpion TV, Sincerely Films, Terra Nova Films, and KimStim. Bullfrog and Icarus were founded in the 1970s and together founded Docuseek to stream documentaries via college libraries.

To explore the content, browse the platform, or if you are looking for a specific title, use the Library’s OneSearch discovery tool. Worth noting are Addiction Incorporated (2014), Anthropocene (2016), The Yes Men Fix The World (2009), Xmas Without China (2013), Vulva 3.0 (2014), Mobutu, King of Zaire (2000), United States of Africa (2011), Talk to Me: Teens Speak Out About Sexual Violence (2006), The American Ruling Class (2007), and Death By Design (2017).  

To further whet your appetite, some titles are described below.

Finally Got the News (2003): A documentary “about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which was, ‘in many respects the most significant expression of black radical thought and activism in the 1960s.’ —Manning Marable, Prof. of History, Columbia Univ.” (Docuseek2 description).

The Great Flood (2013): Original footage of the Mississippi River Flood of 1927, with a wordless soundtrack of blues inspired music.

Brother Towns / Pueblos Hermanos (2010): “An uplifting story about Jupiter, Florida’s humane response to an influx of day laborers from Jacaltenango, Guatemala….Our story includes voices of those opposed to undocumented immigrants as well as advocates helping migrants who seek work and hope, whether documented or not” (Docuseek2 description).

Nostalgia for the Light (2011): “Director Patricio Guzman travels to Chile’s Atacama Desert where astronomers examine distant galaxies, archaeologists uncover traces of ancient civilizations, and women dig for the remains of disappeared relatives” (Docuseek2 description).

Milking the Rhino (2009): “The promise of community-based conservation in Africa” (Docuseek2 description).

Facing Death (2003): “A comprehensive look into the life and work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of the landmark On Death and Dying” (Docuseek2 description). 

How Happy Can You Be? (2005): “What is happiness? And how do we get more of it? Visiting leading figures in positive psychology and observing clinical experiments, this is a light-hearted but serious investigation” (Docuseek2 description).

Swim for the River (2006): A swimmer swims the Hudson River from its source in the Adirondacks all the way to New York Harbor, talking to people along the way about past and present pollution threats, including oil seeping into the Newtown Creek.

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Tracing transnational organized crime

Maria Kiriakova

Recently, the library cataloged an electronic version of The World Atlas of Illicit Flows.

This 152-page document was introduced on the margins of the 73rd United Nations General Assembly on September 25th. Its creation was possible due to the collaboration between INTERPOL, RHIPTO Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses, and the Global Initiative. Through outstanding charts and graphs, the atlas illustrates how transnational organized crime has infiltrated every corner of society worldwide, exploiting governance weaknesses during local conflicts and sustaining non-armed groups and terrorists. The document provides the first consolidated overview of illicit flows and their significance in conflicts worldwide. There are over a thousand smuggling routes worldwide of goods and services associated with environmental crime, drugs, and people.

Twelve chapters illustrate an atrocious scope of the catastrophe of transnational organized crime, including environmental crime, which is more lucrative than human trafficking. It provides more than a third of income that finances the largest armed groups. Two other big groups of sources for armed groups are illegal trade and exploitation of fuel (20 percent), and illicit taxation and extortion (17 percent). Twenty-eight percent of these groups’ income is derived from production, trafficking, and taxation of drugs. The largest, least risky, and most profitable illicit environmental industry is illegal logging. Other crimes in the World Atlas of Illicit Flows includes illegal wildlife trade; in the document, we learn that pangolins are the world’s most trafficked animals. Human trafficking is also covered; economically speaking, it is the fourth-largest global crime sector, with an estimated annual market value of at least US$157 billion.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, one of the sponsors of the World Atlas of Illicit Flows, is a non-for-profit organization that attempts to regenerate the debate around countering organized crime, illicit trafficking, and trade. Established about seven years ago, this network of experts around the world grew rapidly, including experts in law enforcement agencies, law practitioners, senior officials in international organizations like UN and INTERPOL, academics, and civil society organizations. It encourages free thinking and debate, looks at the problems of trafficking and illicit trade from new angles, mobilizes political will, and creates new ideas. The Global Initiative website has an abundance of information, research publications, policy briefs, infographics, and more. The research publications can be searched by topic, type of document and type of crime.

The Global Initiative is a young organization that has big potential and is already influential in the international arena. Its website should be bookmarked by students learning about international criminal justice, terrorism, economic and environmental crimes. The Global Initiative’s recent environmental crime projects include a search engine that deconstructs law into data, setting the foundation for an unprecedented ability to conduct smart searches within the laws, compare key legal concepts among jurisdictions, and assess the quality of legal systems to effectively manage societal challenge. Another initiative, UN-TOC Watch, seeks to monitor and analyze how the UN System has been responding to organized crime in the period 2012-2017. There were 1,113 UN Security Council passed resolutions analyzed in reference to different types of crime. The findings are just hot off the press, titled Organized Crime and Its Role in Contemporary Conflict: An Analysis of UN Security Council Resolutions. The collected data can be further explored by the region and type of crime.

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Selected by Maria Kiriakova

Duncombe, L. (2017). Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Stacks G535 .D848 2017

DuPont, R. (2018). Chemical Slavery: Understanding Addiction and Stopping the Drug Epidemic. Rockville, MD: Institute for Behavior and Health. Stacks RC564.29 .D876 2018

Eatmon, D., & Fairey, Shepard. (2017). Chuck D presents This Day in Rap and Hip-Hop History. London: Cassell Illustrated. Stacks ML3531 .C58 2017

Fliter, J. (2018). Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Stacks KF3552 .F55 2018

Galeotti, M. (2018). The Vory: Russia's Super Mafia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stacks HV6439.R8 G35 2018

Khan-Cullors, P., Bandele, Asha, & Davis, Angela Y. (2018). When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Stacks E185.97.K43 A3 2018

Lebron, C. (2017). The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Stacks E185.615 .L393 2017 and ebook.

Macy, B. (2018). Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Company that Addicted America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Stacks RC568.O45 M33 2018

Oldfield, W., & Bruce, Victoria. (2018). Inspector Oldfield and the Black Hand Society: America's Original Gangsters and the U.S. Postal Detective Who Brought Them to Justice. New York: Touchstone. Stacks HV6448 .O53 2018

Walton, T. (2010). Challenges in Intelligence Analysis: Lessons from 1300 BCE to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press. Reserve JF1525.I6 W39 2010

Wiener, G., Adcock, Jennifer, & Greaves, Lucy. (2018). Sexographies. Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books. Stacks HQ29 .W536 2018

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Reviewing NYPL’s ebook reader

Robin Davis

As I waited on the Columbus Circle subway platform, a friend emailed me to recommend Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s 2015 novel. By the time the C train doors opened—really!—I was already reading the ebook for free on my smartphone with the SimplyE app. A little frisson of librarian glee ran through me.

Anyone who has struggled with other ebook readers from libraries will understand my joy. Historically, apps like Overdrive and Adobe Digital Editions have been very user-unfriendly. (Even the ebook vendors that Lloyd Sealy Library works with make downloading ebooks for offline use very difficult, although reading online is a cinch.) But SimplyE simply works.

How to use SimplyE

SimplyE is free to download and is available for iOS and Android, and it requires a library card sign-in. If you have a New York Public Library (NYPL) or Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) card, you can access ebooks that are available through those library systems. The app’s home screen displays current best sellers in fiction and non-fiction, staff picks of recent publications, young adult books, and books in Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. Just tap on a book cover to download or reserve it.

(Don’t have a library card? First, let me strongly recommend that you get one! As my colleague Maureen Richards notes in this newsletter, there are many benefits to an NYPL card even beyond checking out print books from their many lovely bricks-and-mortar branches. But until you treat yourself to a library card, you can choose to get ebooks on SimplyE by choosing the Digital Public Library of America as your home library. Their ebooks include public domain classics, some academic press publications, and some children’s books.)

Features and bugs

I use the SimplyE app quite a lot on my Android phone. Browsing and searching work as expected, and it’s infrequent that a book I want to read isn’t in the catalog. What is frequent, however, are long queues for very popular books. (I am currently 635th in line to read Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects.) Just like print books, library ebooks are usually limited in number, so only a certain number of people can download it at a time. Don’t get disheartened, though—you can reserve a place in the queue for unavailable ebooks, and in the meantime, there are plenty of available ones. You can filter the catalog to display only currently downloadable books to avoid disappointment.

Ebook downloads are very fast. The app allows you to read downloaded ebooks without network service, which can be a lifesaver when your subway train is delayed in a tunnel.

There is one odd bug in the Android app that plagues me: when I change font size or page background color, the app takes me back to the first page in the chapter I’m reading—even if that means rewinding 200 pages. (As a programmer myself, I can appreciate the challenge of this seemingly simple function.) As it happens, this bug turns out to be a great incentive to finish a chapter before closing out of SimplyE.

Background of the app

The app is designed and built by Library Simplified, a group of 10 public libraries with NYPL as the lead partner. The Library Simplified project is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. “Through our collective action,” the Library Simplified website says, “libraries can better connect more people to more books[,] for we believe more people reading more is our ultimate mission. SimplyE is how we hope to connect more people to more books from libraries.”* Hear, hear!

* Source: “About.” Library Simplified. Accessed 17 Oct. 2018.

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The new look of LexisNexis

Kathleen Collins

Many of us are by now familiar with using LexisNexis to find news and legal resources. The LexisNexis interface that we’re used to is getting a face lift and a name change. In fact, it already has—Nexis Uni. Currently in the library’s list of popular databases, you will see both the classic and the new versions, but as of the end of 2018, the classic will disappear.

If you are used to looking for cases in LexisNexis, the same task in Nexis Uni may take a little getting used to. As always, there is more than one way to use the database to find a case and the most obvious-seeming options can be a bit confusing at first. Looking at the main search page of Nexis Uni, you will see a Guided Search area with the question “What are you interested in?” This is tempting, especially as there is a Cases option planted squarely below. However, once you select that cases button, the next question is “State or Federal?” This may be an obstacle to a user who is not certain of the jurisdiction.

So perhaps you go back to the main search page and this time see the “Get a Doc Assistance” link just below the search box. This is tempting, too, especially since, once selected, it seems to be all about cases. You can search by citation, party names or docket number. If you are well-versed in legal research, this may please you, as there are detailed options you can select to conduct a controlled search. The average user, however, will likely feel overwhelmed with the choices. The party names option looks promising but returns zero results unless you also select a jurisdiction. So, back to the home page.

I can vouch for a more direct route to finding a case, especially if what you seek is a specific case for which you have at least one party name, or a case on a particular issue. In the main search box, type your search term (e.g. Griswold or Title IX), then in the dropdown box to the left of the search box (where it says “All Nexis Uni”) you can open that to choose Cases from a list, then select Search in the lower right of that same page. If your desired results do not appear early on in the list, you can enter a party name or a key word on the left side of the page to narrow the results.

One other note to keep in mind. There is a prominently displayed “Export Citation” button at the top of each document. This takes you to a set of options for citation styles, but does not (yet?) connect with citation managers like RefWorks as classic LexisNexis did.

I don’t mean to disparage Nexis Uni. It improves in several ways upon the classic, most notably in its clean appearance and the ability to run either natural language or Boolean searches. They will likely continue to make changes in coming months to address users’ needs. The Discover Topics link presented on the home page, which may be a replacement for the Hot Topics links in the classic version, can be a useful tool for generating topic ideas, via three broad categories: Business, Criminal Justice, and Political Science.

To end on a positive note, Nexis Uni is still the excellent source for news and legal resources that it always has been—it’s just a matter of adjusting to new strategies to get to them.

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Database overview

Karen Okamoto

HeinOnline’s Slavery in America and the World database provides free public access to countless English-language legal materials, pamphlets and books on slavery. Though the collection covers slavery in other parts of the world, its content is largely from and about the United States. Its legal materials include every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute pertaining to slavery, and all reported state and federal cases about slavery. It also includes legal commentary published before 1920 as well as modern law reviews. Its non-legal materials consist of books and pamphlets from the Buffalo Public Library’s rare book collection.

Users can search and browse the collection from a number of access points. The main page includes a full text search, a link to an advanced search, and several browsing options for quick access to specific types of documents. For example, researchers can click on the “Slavery Statutes” tab to access and review federal and state statutes. The advanced search provides a number of filters such as document type, which includes speeches, narratives, and specific legal documents.

Originally conceived as a subscription-based database, HeinOnline decided in 2016 to make Slavery in America and the World free to the public. This decision was in response to, as the company president outlines in a press release, the crisis in race relations in America. HeinOnline decided to rethink the idea of profiting from a collection on slavery. This means that well after graduation, our students can access this important and impressive collection that brings together HeinOnline’s strong legal collections with non-legal documents in one searchable platform.

Please also consult:

• The “Slavery and Anti-slavery related primary sources” tab on Ellen Belcher’s “Primary Sources: Digital Archival Collections” research guide
• The New York Slavery Records Index, created by John Jay professors and students

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Search and serendipity

Jeffrey Kroessler

I am trying to track down a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The ends pre-exist in the means.” Writing about terrorism, I want to contrast that Emersonian idea with its opposite: “The ends justify the means,” or as Malcolm X put it, “By any means necessary.” What I need is the citation.

Without anything at hand to go on, I first entered the words in quotes into the OneSearch box on the library’s homepage. Nothing. But that should not be surprising, as this is designed to identify sources for research. Even so, the quotation might have turned up somewhere.

Google Scholar is a better option, because it does allow searching for an exact quotation. Here I added “Emerson” in the search box. Surely the original will turn up, or maybe it will be cited in another work. The search does not yield the original source but does offer an intriguing array of essays containing a version of the quote.

The first is “Educational Appraisals,” by Ross L. Mooney, in Education Research Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 2 (Feb. 13, 1957). In this case I can access the entire eight-page piece. But the quote is not in that essay. Rather, it is found at the end of the previous piece on the page the Mooney piece begins. So, the first result in this search did not bring up the article where the quote was to be found. The article listed second by Google Scholar, “Educational Means” by Edgar Dale from the same publication, was the one with the quote. The Emerson reference was footnoted: an entry titled “Education” in his journals dated September 13, 1831 (that author used a 1909 edition of his journals; for me, the nearest edition would do). But actually, he summarized the quote and the reference refers to another: “The things which are taught children are not an education, but the means of education.”

So, I search for the referenced journal entry, not confident that the quote would be found there. The library catalog yielded Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 16-volume set published between 1960 and 1982. On the shelf, however I find only Volume 7 (1838-1842). Clicking deeper into the bibliographic record I learn that John Jay only has Volume 7. That was after I had gone into the stacks. Frustrating. And I’m the librarian! 

Back to the Google Scholar results. A promising item is “Sources of Value for Modern Man” by Eduard C. Lindemane, in Religious Education, vol. 42, 1947. Alas, access to the full piece is blocked, and searching our collection of journals by title, I found that we do not have it in any database.

The next possibility is “Speech Sportsmanship,” a brief essay by Burton H. Byers in The Speech Teacher, vol. 3, no. 2, 1954 (now Communication Education). The Google Scholar link leads to the publisher’s page, and a dead end (no, I do not wish to purchase the article). Looking again under journals by title, I find that we do have access to the journal. Byers makes great use of the Emerson: “In a totalitarian society, it is generally held that the ends justify the means. A person who believes in democracy is likely to think that greater wisdom was expressed by Emerson when he wrote that the ends pre-exist in the means.” A wonderful application of the idea, but there is no citation.

Moving on to “Postcards from the Edge: Surveying the Digital Divide,” by Andrew G. Celli and Kenneth M. Dreifach, in Cardozo Arts Entertainment Law Journal, 20 (2002). They reference Emerson and locate the source as his 1841 essay “Compensation.” Bingo! The actual sentence in that essay is different, however: “Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”

This was a twisted, frustrating, and ultimately successful research journey, and at its end I am left with two questions. First, is the popular version of the quote—“The ends pre-exist in the means”—to be found elsewhere in Emerson’s writings, somewhere in his journals, perhaps? Or is it simply a pithier version of the sentence from “Compensation”? And second, why did I find several references to this quotation in essays from the 1940s and 1950s but scarcely any from later decades?

The journey continues.

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Maria Kiriakova

It is a hard balance for Lloyd Sealy Library to keep the collections growing, on the one hand, and to provide more quiet study space for a steadily growing student population, on the other hand. We use our creativity to make rearrangements and carve out new space in the existing library physical plant.

This semester, the students are now able to enjoy two new study space additions that are the results of the librarians’ hard work. The computer lab on the ground floor was expanded by gaining a room that can accommodate 24 users. The south wing of the library on the upper level was transformed into the Silent Study Area South, which is full of natural light.

The computer lab expansion idea was born more than five years ago. The library was ready to give up space allocated for the staff to satisfy students’ requests for additional computer seats. Moving the walls was not an easy undertaking, but now the students have a renovated space with brand new furniture. This already popular spot will definitely be appreciated during the 24-hour Library Lounge & Lab operation at the end of each semester during finals period.

The creation of the Silent Study Area South was an attempt to make a space without breaking any walls. We decided to compress the bound periodicals collection and create an opening at the end of the south wing on the upper level, mirroring the existing quiet study area in the north wing. Despite the dropped ceiling, the room now looks bright and airy, thanks to the big windows along two walls. It took a month of physical labor this summer by Maria Kiriakova, Matt Murphy, Ellen Belcher, Ellen Sexton, Jeff Kroessler, Mark Zubarev, and Omar Rivera to move 34,200 volumes. We had to make the calculations and measurements first, vacuum the books, rearrange and clean the shelves, and check and fix the records in the catalog. The Office of Space Planning helped with new carpeting and building of two countertops. Geng Lin coordinated the electric and data wiring aspects for both projects.

These new study spaces fit well into John Jay College students’ ideal vision of an academic library. The Pop-Up Library’s surveys in March of this year revealed that the young scholars imagined “quiet,” “calming,” and “distraction-free” spaces in their ideal library. These two study spaces fulfill these dreams.

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Expanding access to NYPL, Columbia University, & Princeton University shared collections

Maureen Richards

During the first few weeks of the fall semester, you may have noticed the New York Public Library (NYPL) table in the Atrium. NYPL staff were present to streamline the process for getting a fully activated NYPL library card, with a barcode and PIN.

Hundreds of students signed up, many of whom learned they were eligible to receive a NYPL library card simply because they attend a school in New York City. Those who thought they had an active card—NYPL cards must be renewed every 3 years—were able to make sure that they did.

John Jay librarians were also on hand to explain that in addition to the 88 neighborhood branches that focus on serving the needs of the local community, NYPL cardholders have access to world-renowned scholarly resources that include:

• NYPL’s four research libraries
• Hundreds of specialized and multidisciplinary databases
• Thousands of ebooks
• Shared Collection Catalog

The research materials in the databases and ebooks are appropriate for academic work and are accessible remotely, so long as you have an active NYPL barcode and PIN.  

NYPL’s Shared Collection Catalog is the newest tool for discovering the research collections available to NYPL library card holders. This catalog searches all of NYPL’s on-site research collection and items stored in an off-site facility that is owned and operated by NYPL, Columbia University, and Princeton University libraries, to facilitate the sharing of resources. Through this new Shared Collection Catalog, you can now easily search, find, and gain access to millions of items that are part of this shared collection.

How the Shared Collection Catalog works

Start at the Shared Collection Catalog search box which can be found behind the Research tab on the NYPL homepage. It looks like this:

Conduct a search and look under Status to see if the item is available at an NYPL location or whether you have to request the item:

When the item is not immediately available, you can click on the title to find out more, including which of the three libraries systems owns the materials. Once you request an item, you will be prompted to enter your active NYPL barcode and PIN, then choose a delivery option. Materials can be delivered to one or more locations at NYPL research libraries or you can request to have a small portion (such as the table of contents, single article, book chapter or index) of the item scanned and emailed to you.

If you order a book before 2:30pm, Monday through Thursday, it will be delivered to NYPL the next day. Special items, like films that need projectors, will be delivered to the NYPL library with the viewing equipment. Keep in mind that these items may not be taken out of the NYPL building, but they will keep any requested materials on hold for you as long as you need them—so you can come back each day and use them.

If you have already used this new Shared Collection Catalog, please let us know about your experience.  If you have not, start exploring it now!

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