Category Archives: Featured Resources

Brown University Library Opens The Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab!

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Rendering of New Lab

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — This October, the Brown University Library celebrates the opening of The Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library. The Lab is made possible thanks to the generosity of Mr. Patrick Ma, P’14, who is based in Hong Kong, China, Brown Trustee Cathy Halstead, and an anonymous donor.

Installing a panel of the video wall

The Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab features a large scale visualization video wall comprised of twelve 55 inch high resolution LED screens, creating a 7 x 16 foot display with a combined resolution of over 24 megapixels, offering high quality viewing and analytical space not publicly available elsewhere on campus.  The Lab is also outfitted with a wide range of software for scholars across the disciplines, a surround sound audio system, video-conferencing capabilities, specialized lighting, and several individual touch screen monitors that can be used independently or linked to the video wall for collaborative display and interaction.

Finishing touches to video wall

Patrick Rashleigh, the Library’s newly appointed Data Visualization Coordinator, will oversee the operation of the Lab, provide instruction and outreach to faculty, students, and interdisciplinary campus groups and support individual and course-based visualization projects. Rashleigh previously served as the Faculty Technology Liaison for the Humanities in the Research and Instruction group at Wheaton College; and Senior New Media Coordinator for the Attorney General of Ontario.

View of Digital Scholarship Lab under construction

As Joukowsky Family University Librarian Harriette Hemmasi explained, “The Brown University Library is a physical and virtual space for experimentation, production, and processing of new knowledge. The new Lab will provide necessary tools for faculty and staff to explore and define scholarly forms beyond their current capabilities.”

More information about the Lab’s opening and programming will be available later this month.

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world. http://library.brown.edu/

Contact: Amy Atticks | Amy_Atticks@brown.edu | (401) 863-6913

 

 

New Brochure Listing Brown University Library Events and Exhibits

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The Brown University Library is pleased to share a new brochure listing fall 2012 events and exhibits which are free and open to the public. A digital version is available here. Hard copies are available at Library locations. More information about these and other programs will continue to be made available in the announcements section of the Library website.

Website for Digital Art & Humanities Lecture Series, Now Live!

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] –The Brown University Library is launching a new website which hosts abstracts and videos from the 2011-2012 Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series.  The series was jointly sponsored by Brown University Library and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

Over the course of the fall and spring semesters, five nationally recognized digital scholars came to campus to meet with graduate students, faculty, and digital staff, and to present on their research during an evening lecture. The series kicked off on October 3, 2011 with “Remembering Networks: Agrippa, RoSE and Network Archaeology” by renowned digital scholar, Alan Liu. The October lecture preceded Richard White’s “The Spatial Turn in History,” and “In the stack of the livebrary” by Jeffrey Schnapp. The last two lectures, “Post-archive: Scholarship in the Digital Age” by Tara McPherson, and “A Noisy Archaeology” by Paul DeMarinis, were filmed and are available for viewing.

The John Nicholas Brown Center helps connect academic communities and the broader public through history, art, and culture. We support people and organizations that explore, preserve, and interpret cultural heritage. Our programs explore the ways in which the humanities enrich everyday life.

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world.

Contact: Amy Atticks | Amy_Atticks@brown.edu | (401) 863-6913

Brown Receives Works of John Jay Chapman from Daniel Siegel ’57

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John Jay Chapman

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Brown University has received a collection of works by John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), noted man of letters, dramatist, and political reformer, as a gift from longtime Library supporter, Daniel Siegel ’57. 

Born in New York City, the son of Henry Grafton Chapman, one-time president of the New York Stock Exchange, and Eleanor Jay Chapman, the great-granddaughter of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, John Jay Chapman’s writings, like his interests, were varied.  Author of twenty-seven books and numerous articles, Chapman wrote on Shakespeare, Dante, Greek literature, and authored plays for children and adults. He is probably best known for his early reform work, namely, Causes and Consequences and Political Agitation. Chapman, who lived in New York City and later Poughkeepsie, New York, was a fierce advocate of reform, especially in the realm of politics.  He edited and privately published a monthly periodical, The Political Nursery, which served as a fierce critic of Tammany Hall and a promoter of good government.

Daniel Siegel has been collecting the writing of Chapman for many years and published Chapman’s works in twelve volumes in 1970.  Thanks to Mr. Siegel’s generosity, Brown now owns a virtually complete set of Chapman’s writings.

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world. http://library.brown.edu/

Contact: Rosemary Cullen | rosemary_cullen@brown.edu | 401-863-1514

Welcome to the Brown University Library

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A new academic year is upon us. And with it comes a mixture of anticipation and anxiety.

For those just joining the Brown community, the library provides a variety of spaces, services, and resources as well as support for all your intellectual pursuits.

For those already familiar with Brown’s learning field, we’d like to remind you of the many ways the Library can help.

The library wishes you the best of luck this upcoming fall and throughout your educational journey.

Visit us at library.brown.edu

“Dealing with Data” – New Library Publication Now Availaible

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — 
Brown University Library is pleased to announce the release of its newest publication, Dealing with Data.

Dealing with Data features contributions by Library staff and Brown faculty including Harriette Hemmasi, Catherine Busselen, Ann Caldwell, Jean Bauer, Julia Flanders, Amanda Rinehart, John Cayley, Sue Alcock, and Jan S. Hesthaven. The authors discuss a range of issues related to data description, management, and preservation, data visualization and the importance of data in research and teaching.

Free, print copies of the publication are available at the John D. Rockefeller Library, Sciences Library, Orwig Music Library, and John Hay Library. A PDF of Dealing with Data is available here.

Dealing with Data is sponsored by Brown University Library and Friends of the Library, with funding provided by the Richard and Edna Salomon Publications Fund. Most recently, the Salomon Fund also supported the print and digital publication of a revised Special Collections of the Brown University Library: A History and Guide, and a brochure about Brown’s Chinese collections, which is currently being translated into Chinese.

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world. http://library.brown.edu/

Contact: Amy Atticks | Amy_Atticks@brown.edu | (401) 863-6913

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Brown Provides New Content for World Digital Library

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Screenshot of an Image from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection in the World Digital Library

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — This month the World Digital Library (WDL), an open access website sponsored by UNESCO and the Library of Congress featuring unique cultural materials and national treasures from libraries and archives around the world, has integrated 40 additional images from the Brown University Library.  Expanding the WDL’s coverage of Africa, Asia, and South America, an assortment of gouache paintings, watercolors, chromolithographs, pencil drawings, and other works from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection are accompanied by object information and narrative descriptions touching on a variety of themes. And, to strengthen the WDL’s content about Iran, additional Persian materials will be added later this year.

Since 2009, staff from Brown University Library and dozens of other institutions have been working with the WDL to promote cross-cultural awareness by providing access to iconographic stories and achievements from around the globe. Available free of charge on the internet and presented in a multilingual format, the WDL provides a rich and diverse database that can be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution. Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The WDL is one of many outreach initiatives undertaken by the Brown University Library to make its collections more accessible and better known around the world.  The Brown University Library also hosts an extensive set of digitized materials on its website.

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world.

Contact: Amy Atticks | Amy_Atticks@brown.edu | (401) 863-6913

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Brown University Library Discovers Buried Treasure

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 27, 2012

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – The Preservation Department of Brown University Library has discovered an exceptionally rare engraved print by Paul Revere.

As long as two hundred years ago, Solomon Drowne, Brown University Class of 1773 and a professor in the early Brown University Medical School, tucked a little something into one of his books, The Modern Practice of Physic, by Robert Thomas, published in 1811. The John Hay Library received the book in 1940, with the rest of Drowne’s Library.  During a recent inspection of the Drowne books, Marie Malchodi, of the Library’s Preservation Department, discovered this little something: an engraved depiction of Christ and John the Baptist, both of them chest deep in the Jordan River, titled “Buried with Him by Baptism” and signed “P. Revere sculp.”

The print is characterized by Clarence S. Brigham in Paul Revere’s Engravings, the standard reference, as “one of the scarcest of the plates signed by Revere.” The Brown University Library’s copy is the fifth known to exist. Other copies are housed at the American Antiquarian Society, the Worcester Art Museum, and a private museum collection in Massachusetts; another, which Brigham mistakenly thought had been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), was offered at auction by Sotheby’s in 2007.

As Richard Noble, Rare Materials Cataloger explains “The print is of considerable interest simply because Revere made it, but it is also an intriguing and very serious theopolitical cartoon, depicting the baptism in a manner that was the subject of lively debate in eighteenth-century New England religious circles. Brigham was unable to identify a model for it in any English book or periodical, or connect it with any of the tracts on baptism published on this side of the Atlantic from 1760 to 1780. It appears to be an American original, by an American original, the son of French Huguenot refugees who eventually became, by all accounts, a Unitarian. The print thus marks a stage in the evolution of that aspect of Revere’s life.”

The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world.

Contact: Ann Dodge|  Ann_Dodge@Brown.edu | (401) 863-1502

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Check out the Friedman DVD Collection!

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Check out the latest flicks from the Friedman DVD Collection at Sci Li! We now have over 800 movies. Browse the collection online before heading over to the service desk. Browsing allows you to see what IMDb has to say about the film, and confirm whether the DVD is currently available for check-out.

Brown students can borrow two Friedman DVDs at a time and keep them for up to three days. We also encourage suggestions for recent feature-length movies to add to the collection!