Criminal Law Library Blog
David Badertscher
The New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County) is pleased to announce a major enhancement regarding access to those Temporary Commission on Revision of New York Penal Law and Criminal Code (1961-1970) papers held by the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County). During the past year we in the library have been working with professional interns, archivists, and especially Philip Yow and his web design team at the State of New York Unified Court System to find ways to preserving these materials, many of which were beginning to deteriorate significantly. After confronting various obstacles, technical and otherwise, we settled on digitizing the material as a number of separate and searchable pdf files and then placing all of them on the library website with an overlay of google searchability. Although this may not be perfect it does make the documents accessible on the web in a cost effective manner.
A word of further explanation. these papers primarily consisting of documents submitted to and documents produced by the Temporary Commission on Revision of Penal Laws and Criminal Code (1961-1970) were collected by our former Administrative Judge Peter Mcquillan who served on the staff of the Commission. Justice Mcquillan left the Papers in my custody when he retired and we first put up an index to the papers on the web and now the full text of these materials. In addition we have included The Proposed New York Criminal Procedure Law of 1969 because in addition to the text of the proposed law, it includes valuable additional materials related to the work of the Commission and derivation tables for use in comparing the current Code with the earlier Code. Special permission was obtained from Thomson Reuters before publishing the latter segment.
To see the new site of the library website from which this material can be searched online, go to:
http://www.nycourts.gov/library/nyc_criminal/library_resources.shtml and scroll down if necessary to the search box under the first entry under this Section: Penal Law Records Search.
In order to resolve various format and other issues alluded to earlier, most searches will need to consist of two parts. Entering a search term or terms in the search box provided at this location will bring up various pdf documents where the terms entered are mentioned. Some of these pdf documents are very large. To determine exactly where in these pdf documents the terms are referenced you will need to enter your search a second time in the pdf search box at the upper right side of the document. This search should identify and highlight exactly where in the document the search terms you entered are highlighted.
Finally, for those people who need additional information about documents included in this collection prior to searching, we have preserved the original index or finding aid which is located at http://www.nycourts.gov/library/nyc_criminal/Temporary%20Commission.pdf