Faculty Office Delivery

The library is pleased to offer a new service for Faculty. You may request library books for delivery to your campus mail address or administrative office. We will deliver requested items from our own collection as well as those obtained for you through Borrow Direct, the Virtual Catalog and InRhode. We will notify you of the availability of the requested title and if you wish to have it delivered, reply to that effect to the notification email.
For further information see: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/libweb/facdel.php or contact Bart_Hollingsworth@brown.edu

Openness is More Than a State of Mind: Open Standards, Open Source and Open Innovation

A Friends of the Library Event – Join the Friends!
Elliot E. Maxwell
Wednesday, December 6th
4 – 5 pm, Lownes Room, John Hay Library
Reception to follow
The Internet and the increased availability of tools useful for the creation and modification of digital products have enabled and promoted openness in many areas of our culture and economy and have given rise to an “age of participation.” Openness, defined as a process, product or institution’s accessibility and responsiveness, is fundamentally changing innovation, making it more distributed and collaborative, in other words, more open. Open standards facilitate openness; open source software embodies openness in its organization, processes, and legal regime; and “open innovation” is becoming increasingly visible in everything from the creation of the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia by volunteers, to the marketplace of e-Bay, and ultimately to the Web itself. Openness is even changing the way value is created from a model based on holding one’s creation tightly and metering out access to one where value is enhanced by widespread sharing. Among the key challenges in this “age of participation” are how to make judgments about the information that is available–how to determine its credibility, how to rate it and its source–in other words how to decide what is worthy of trust. This is of increasing importance as new ways of organizing information are being developed, new sources of information rating are being employed, new threats to information security are arising, and new forms of economic activity based upon user contributions are coming into being.
Elliot E. Maxwell is an author and lecturer, as well as an advisor to public and private sector clients on strategic issues involving the intersection of business, technology, and public policy in the Internet, E-commerce and telecommunications domains. Mr. Maxwell is chair of the Advisory Council on Computing and Information Technology at Brown University and a member of the Emeriti Executive Committee. He is a Fellow of the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University and Distinguished Research Fellow at the eBusiness Research Center of the Pennsylvania State University. He was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters by Brown with Ira Magaziner in 1994 on the 25th anniversary of the new curriculum.

No more ‘routine’ library fines !

We are pleased to anounce that the University Library will no longer charge routine fines of $0.20 per day on overdue library material. We view this change as yet another way to support students in their use of library collections. Courtesy reminder notices are emailed 5 days prior to due dates and many library materials are renewable online.

Normal loan periods for Brown students:

Graduate students have two loan periods: academic year and summer loan. For undergraduate students, books borrowed in one month are due on the last day of the following month. Most material is renewable online at: https://library.brown.edu/patroninfo~S7.
Library charges:
No daily fines for regular overdue materials.
Fine for overdue recalled material: $1 per day.
Fine for overdue course reserve material: $0.50 per hour.
Replacement charge for lost library material: $150, as below:
Library material that is more than 30 days overdue will prompt a JOSIAH bill for $150 per item ($125 for the material + $25 processing fee). If the bill is not addressed promptly, the bill is sent to the Bursar for collection and the $25 fee is not refunded when the billed item is returned.
For further information contact Steven_Lavallee@brown.edu

New Titles, July – September 2006 & Browsable List of Films

Are you wondering which new titles have been added to our collections recently? Are you curious about the subject breakdown of these titles? Just check the quarterly update of the list of new titles cataloged for July-Sept. 2006: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/newtitles/
Would you like to know which films are available? The list of the 5,768 films available at Media Services, the Language Resource Center, Orwig Music and the John Hay libraries can be browsed at: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/collatoz/videos.php
For further information contact your subject specialist librarian or libweb@brown.edu

Preview the New Library Website

The Library is in the process of redesigning its website. Although our work is far from complete, we are making our progress public in order to solicit feedback while design and content are still evolving. Aworking prototype of the new site is available at: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/libweb.
Our redesign process began with an accessibility review and usability testing of the old site. Test results and focus group feedback is available at: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/libweb/redesign
The old site will continue to be available at least until Intersession. We plan to switch to the new site by the beginning of Spring semester. We will continue to do usability testing and run focus groups throughout Spring semester as we work toward the completion of this redesign process.
Please send comments to libweb@brown.edu or complete our feedback form at: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/libweb/forms/feedback.php

New Database Trial: Digital Sanborn Maps

Now until 12/28/06, the Library has free access online to Digital Sanborn Maps covering 1867-1970. This series of maps was created for fire insurance companies and contain information such as use and owner of each building and site. The series deals with over 12,000 American municipalities, showing great detail at 50 ft. per inch.
To logon, please go to Database Trials Page at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/eresources/restr/trials.php
For further information, contact Thomas_Stieve@brown.edu