What we do: The Robson Collection at the Napier Library

The Robson Collection is named in honour of Dr John Robson who was one of New Zealand's leading

criminologists. In 1962 he led the way in the abolition of the death penalty. The rationale of the Robson

Collection is to provide resources in a designated collecting area in penal policy, criminal justice and

social justice.

The intention is to make this material available to the general public (as opposed to academics,

university students, and researchers etc who more typically access these kind of publications). The

collection has a strong educational and bi-cultural perspective.

In addition to books, materials including research papers, statistics, policy papers and published

conference papers. It includes local, national and international publications.

The collection was opened in 1990 by Mayor Alan Dick and John Harre - former director of the Hawke's

Bay Community College. The collection is housed on the second floor of the Napier City Library and

can be accessed during opening hours. Each year a variety of new titles are added to the collection.

At the end of 2010 a special event was held to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collection. This

included a variety of prominent speakers and concluded with the presentation of the following books to

the collection: Healing Our History (Robert Consedine); Limits to Pain, A Suitable Amount of Crime,

Crime Control as an Industry (all by Nils Christie); Punishment and Civilisation and the Penal

Population (John Pratt); The Spirit Level (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett); Family Victims and

Culture: Youth Justice in NZ (Gabrielle Maxwell & Alison Morris);

Restorative Justice Practices in NZ: Towards a Restorative Society (Gabrielle Maxwell & James Liu);

Addressing the Causes of Crime: What is the Evidence? (Ed. Gabrielle Maxwell); Effective

Programmes for Young People at Serious Risk of Offending (Gabrielle Maxwell and Peter Marsh). A

repeat event is planned for November 2011. To vist the information page for the hui, click here.

Also during 2011 the Trust intends introducing a Robson Collection Scholar in Residence programme

- for details, click here.

Each year the Trust publishes a summer holiday reading list - to download the latest, click here

To link to the Napier libraries catalogue for a search of the collection, please click here

To download a prospectus on the collection (in PDF format) please click here

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