Category Archives: New Resources & Services

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 Eresources Problem Report Form

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The Library now has an electronic resources problem report form available to the Brown community. It is linked on the Database A-Z list, the Ejournal A-Z list, and other places on the Library Web. The direct URL is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE56bDlkay04WUdRTDk4aTNHRmVIcXc6MQ.

If you have any comments/questions about the form, please contact Anne_Nolan@brown.edu.

Put the Brown Library inside Your Phone

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Recent studies have shown that people use their phones sometimes. One of the goals of the Brown University Library is to get used by phones. The moBUL app was created so people could use the library with their phones. The Brown University Library enjoys being used by phones. Sometimes the Brown University Library wished it got used more often by phones. Please use the library every time you use your phone.

The moBUL app is free and includes:

  • Library hours and locations
  • Josiah, the Library catalog
  • Real-time computer availability
  • A lot of other stuff

Download now at library.brown.edu/m/

Brown University to Host NEH Funded Institute

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Women Writers Project and CDS are very pleased to announce our participation in an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities 2012 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities competition. This grant, led by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, will fund a series of workshops on data curation in the digital humanities, aimed at humanities scholars, librarians, and archivists interested in sustaining meaningful access to humanities research materials. In the Humanities, where knowledge remains vital long after its creation, digital curation provides a set of tools, standards, verification, access, and preservation needed to responsibly care for knowledge over the long term. Support for data curation is increasingly central to the work of the Library as we continue to add new faculty and student born-digital research into the Brown Digital Repository.

The institutes involve a three-way collaboration between Brown University, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The grant award supports several key activities:

• three institutes, one held at each participating center, during the course of 2013
• development of a strong curriculum for teaching digital humanities data curation
• further development of the DHCuration Guide, a annotated resource guide for data curation in the humanities

The curriculum developed for these institutes will be reused in other venues, such as the WWP’s own workshop series, workshops offered as part of DHSI and DHWI, and the training programs to be offered through TAPAS.

A call for participants will be announced in late fall 2012 with the Institute beginning in Spring 2013. For more information visit: http://mith.umd.edu/research/project/data-curation/

“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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Works from “Contemporary Architecture”: A Course with Professor Dietrich Neumann

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Miya Schneider & Patrick Till ’13 Trubek & Wislocki Houses, Nantucket, MA. By Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, 1970–1972.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Stop by the Laura and David Finn Reading Room the next time you are in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library to view Works from “Contemporary Architecture”:  A Course with Professor Dietrich Neumann.

Anna M. Giovannini ’13 4x4 House, Kobe, Japan. By Tadao Ando, 2003.

In Neumann’s course, students examine stylistic, technological, and methodological developments in architecture since the 1960s; they learn about the work of renowned architects including Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid; and they study the complex conditions of contemporary architectural production in different parts of the world.

As a final project, Neumann offers his students the choice of either writing a research paper or creating a physical representation of a built structure. This year, Neumann and his Teaching Assistants selected several of his students’ architectural models for display at the Rock. The models vary greatly and include miniatures of the Aquatics & Fitness Center, Brown University; Sogn Benedetg Chapel, Sumvigt, Switzerland; and Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo.

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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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!

Brown University Library Joins the Digital Library of the Caribbean

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Samuel Hazard. Port-au-Prince. New York: Harper, 1873. In: Santo Domingo, past and present, with a glance at Hayti. Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, John Hay Library.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – In support of President Ruth Simmons’ 2010 Haitian Studies Initiative and the work of Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Africana Studies Department, Brown University Library has recently become a contributing member of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries and private collections.

“Through its contribution to the expansion of dLOC, the Brown Library is taking an important step in building resources on the Caribbean diaspora and furthering the advancement of Caribbean Studies and the Haitian Studies Initiative on campus,”  stated Scholarly Resources Librarian, Dominique Coulombe.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC’s diverse partners serve an international community of scholars, students, and citizens by working together to preserve and to provide enhanced electronic access to cultural, historical, legal, governmental, and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections in a common web space with a multilingual interface.

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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New Library Home Page and Search Technology — Coming September 1

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Mock-up of new library home page A cleaner, less cluttered library home page will debut on September 1, 2011. The new design will gracefully adjust to tablet and smart phone dimensions and will feature new technology for searching all of the library’s resources from a single search box. These resources include:

“Books+” — Josiah (library catalog), plus over 57,000 digital objects from special collections, full text dissertations from the Brown Digital Repository, and Library Resource Guides compiled by subject librarians
“Articles” — over 200,000,000 online articles from the library’s vast array of licensed and subscription sources
“Everything” — “Books+” and “Articles” side by side

Access to the the traditional Josiah catalog will continue to be available; some functions – such as viewing course reserves, placing requests, viewing checkouts, renewing material – are currently available only in Josiah. Use the link to Josiah in the detailed record to perform any of these functions.

Library Provides Full Access to New York Times

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The New York Times has instituted restrictions on content effective March 28, 2011. Although some content will remain free, there will be limited access to articles and features for those who do not subscribe to either the print or online version of the paper.

The Library has arranged to provide Brown readers with access to the full text and images of the New York Times via Newsbank. Newsbank offers same-day, full-image, full-text access that includes the Book Review, Magazine, and other supplements. The links are now live via the Josiah catalog. Please see: http://josiah.brown.edu/record=b4146952 (first link) or the the New York Times record in the Library’s e-journal A-Z list at:
http://rl3tp7zf5x.search.serialssolutions.com/ (search New York Times)

A number of other online versions of the Times are also available from the Josiah link above. Users who encounter access trouble should contact us at: libweb@brown.edu or eresources@brown.edu