A unique collection of correspondence between Indonesian adolescents and the psychology professor who has become Southeast Asia's own "Dr. Ruth" is now available at the Cornell University Library.

The records of Sahabat Remaja, a program created to answer Indonesian teenagers' questions about sexuality and relationships, have been added to the Cornell Library's Human Sexuality Collection and the John Echols Collection on Southeast Asia.

Sahabat Remaja, which means "Friend of Youth," began in the 1980s as a cooperative venture between the psychology department of the Universitas Indonesia and the government's Department of Indonesian Family Planning. The program originally offered a phone line to answer young people's questions. Later, a popular magazine began publishing a weekly column called Sahabat Remaja in which letters from Indonesian youths were published anonymously with answers provided by respected psychologist Professor Sarlito Wirawan Sarwono and his assistants, usually students of the Universitas Indonesia psychology department.

Most of the letters to Sahabat Remaja posed questions and sought advice about sexual orientation, sexual activities, birth control and troubled relationships with girlfriends and boyfriends, teachers, parents and friends. The collection, written in Indonesian, consists of thousands of original letters and copies of the responses from Sarwono and his assistants.

"This collection is a one-of-a-kind resource, providing a treasure trove of insights into the problems facing teenagers and young adults in Indonesia's rapidly changing society," says Brenda Marston, curator of the Human Sexuality Collection. "The Sahabat Remaja material will be of great interest to scholars studying Southeast Asian social history as well as those conducting research on contemporary issues in anthropology, sociology, psychology and even political science."

The new collection complements Cornell's highly regarded Asian studies programs and enriches Cornell Library's holdings in the Echols Collection on Southeast Asia and the Human Sexuality Collection.

The Sahabat Remaja Collection found its way to Cornell as the result of a coffee break conversation. On his way back to Indonesia from the Netherlands last year, Sarwono stopped in Ithaca to meet with Cornell Professor of Psychology Thomas Gilovich and to visit the Echols Collection in the Cornell Library. After showing him some of the unique Indonesian material in the Echols Collection, Southeast Asia Librarian Rohayati Paseng Barnard invited Sarwono to coffee. When their conversation turned to Sarwono's work with Indonesian adolescents, he asked Barnard if Cornell would be interested in his collection of letters from the "Friend of Youth" project. Knowing the material would be a valuable addition to both the library's Southeast Asia and Human Sexuality collections, Barnard agreed.

Getting the collection to Cornell, however, proved to be a bit more difficult. In June 1997, Barnard went to Indonesia to finalize several acquisitions and found that the options for sending the Sahabat Remaja Collection to the U.S. were prohibitively expensive. She finally turned to the U.S. Library of Congress regional office in Jakarta. After Barnard explained the situation to the director, William Tuchrello, he kindly agreed to ship the material to Cornell.

Now open to the public, the Sahabat Remaja Collection is housed in Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library, as part of the Human Sexuality Collection. Researchers have already started to inquire about using the collection.