The revised Web edition of the History and Guide to Special Collections is now available. In this guide, the author, Sam Streit, presents highlights of the John Hay Library collections from the University’s inception to the present. This Web publication which is beautifully illustrated will also be available in print later on this fall to coincide with the November 10, 1910 inauguration date of the building.

The Brown University Library is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Hildene-Brown Lincoln Essay Competition:
FIRST PRIZE Sherry Romanzi, Barrington (Gordon School)
SECOND PRIZE Audrey Chisholm, Providence (Gordon School)
THIRD PRIZE (TIE) Gianna Jasinski, Greenville (LaSalle Academy)
THIRD PRIZE (TIE) Sabrina Fowler, Millville, Massachusetts (LaSalle Academy)
HONORABLE MENTION:
Marydjina Barionnette, Providence (Nathanael Greene Middle School)
Mia Murphy, Barrington (Gordon School)
Katherine Rogers, Rumford (La Salle Academy)
Adianna San Lucas, Providence (La Salle Academy)
The Hildene-Brown Lincoln Essay Competition forms part of an ongoing joint effort by the Brown University Library and Hildene to promote the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Hildene, located in Manchester, Vermont, was built by Robert Todd Lincoln in 1905 and was the home of Lincoln descendents until 1975. Today, it is a non-profit museum and education center. Brown University’s John Hay Library, named for the 1858 Brown alumnus who served as Lincoln’s private secretary, holds an extensive collection of manuscripts and printed materials documenting Lincoln’s life and legacy, a portion of which has been made publicly available in digital format at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/lincoln/index.html
The eight winners were selected from a strong pool of 67 entries from students living, working and/or attending public and private schools across Providence County. Winners will attend a Lincoln Birthday Luncheon on January 31st, where the First, Second and Third Prize winners will read their essays aloud. All eight award winners and their parents, or a parent and a teacher, will be guests of Hildene and Brown University at this special event marking Lincoln’s birthday, at which noted Lincoln scholar and former Rhode Island Chief Justice Frank J. Williams will preside.
The Brown University Library and Hildene congratulate the winners, and hope the competition will serve to encourage further study of the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln throughout Rhode Island, capitalizing on the superior resources available at Brown for this purpose.
The essay competition is part of the Brown University Library’s ongoing programming for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, and has been endorsed by the Rhode Island Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

Celebrating Research: A Guide to Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries was recently released to coincide with the organization’s 75th anniversary. The publication is co-edited by Samuel Streit, Brown University’s Director for Special Collections, who also contributed an overview of the University’s Special Collections. In addition to Streit’s extensive contributions, curator Peter Harrington wrote a profile of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection and Ben Tyler, Digital Imaging Specialist, oversaw the design of the page. Housed at the John Hay Library, the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection is the foremost collection in the United States on the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering.
Streit shared responsibility for editing Celebrating Research with Phillip N. Cronenwett, Special Collections Librarian Emeritus, Dartmouth College Library, and Kevin Osborn, Research & Design Ltd. Specific collections of distinction are drawn from 148 member libraries. Among them are the Collection of Rare Maps of the Tokugawa Era from the University of British Columbia Library. The Water Resources Archive from the Colorado State Universities Library, The Emily Dickinson Collection from Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Orson Welles Collection from Indiana University Bloomington’s Lilly Library, and the Cervantes Collection from Texas A& M University’s Cushing Memorial Library. Each profile tells the story of the collection and provides fascinating insight into how each was acquired, maintained, and developed.

[This commentary by Harriette Hemmasi, Joukowsky Family University Librarian, appeared in the March 25 issue of the Providence Journal.]
RECENTLY, PROMINENT scholars and librarians from some of America’s largest research institutions have lamented that the digitization of relics and manuscripts from the past represents a mounting threat to our common cultural heritage.
They worry that the selective and piecemeal way in which digitization is undertaken will mean that certain works will never be made available digitally and that as more scholarly research becomes Web-based, many print-based and other analog artifacts will cease to be a part of our cultural consciousness. Here at Brown we take a more optimistic outlook, while remaining intensely aware of the drawbacks to a process that is still in its nascent stages.
Brown University’s library has rich special collections. We boast the most comprehensive collection of material related to the Temperance Movement and the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous; an extensive collection of letters and manuscripts from that master of the macabre, H.P. Lovecraft; more than 950 manuscripts written by or signed by President Abraham Lincoln; one of the largest collections of material relating to military and naval uniforms in the world; a wide array of 16th Century titles on natural magic, religious rites, and witchcraft; and perhaps most notoriously, three books bound in human skin. The treasures that Brown holds are incalculable and too extensive to list here.
The digitization of rare books and archival material marks an important step in the development of our university and the library’s support of new methods of teaching, learning and research. Popular perceptions of libraries characterize us as static repositories of cultural works, as intractable as the columns that are prominently featured in some of our more famous incarnations — from the Library of Alexandria to the New York Public Library. Digitization refutes this prejudice, showing that, at our best, libraries can and must be dynamic institutions that drive changes in the method by which knowledge is disseminated.
To give you a sense of the progress that Brown has made over the last 10 years, I would note that in 1996 the library had not made a single digital image of any of its special collections or archival material. Less than a decade later, we have more than 350,000 individual digital files and have digitized more than 20,000 items from the library in the past five years. A testimony to the unprecedented access that our collection provides is that the library’s Web site received 3 million hits in 2006 alone, with 62 percent of our virtual visitors coming from off-campus. At the same time, statistics on use of print collections, numbers of users coming into library buildings, and requests to access the physical special-collections materials, both digitized and not, show a steady increase.
The digitization of material has let the library share our treasures in exciting ways. We are using this opportunity to elucidate the history of Brown as an institution as well as the history of Rhode Island — stories that are by their very nature entwined. From the papers of Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in colonial New England who argued for religious freedom, to the correspondence of Thomas Wilson Dorr, whose role in the eponymous Dorr Rebellion brought about our state constitution, we have assiduously set about preserving important aspects of Rhode Island’s history, both in print and more recently online.
Perhaps most importantly, the remarkable compendium of high-resolution images compiled by members of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Committee help shine a light on some of the darker recesses of the past. From the digitization of the compelling materials used by the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice to the acquisition of original manuscripts that document Rhode Island’s deep connections to slavery and the slave trade, the Brown University Library has positioned itself as the creator and supplier of important tools for scholarship by our students, faculty and other researchers.
At the same time that we set about trying to recapture the analog past, one of the great challenges we face will be to figure out an effective way to preserve the digital present. Advances in technology have significantly altered the way in which we communicate and how records are kept.
We no longer keep ledgers and write letters by hand — these records exist digitally, and very little has been done to ensure that they are not simply deleted. Moreover, the rapid advancement of technology means that archivists have a somewhat fickle relationship with the hardware and software that they use to preserve material. Consequently, there is a very real possibility that this material might become inaccessible once the software used to access it is no longer available.
More needs to be done, and it is undeniably true that lack of manpower and funding does impose restrictions. It can cost $2.50 to $5 to produce, catalog and deliver a digital image from our collections and the costs associated with this process will continue to accumulate as we struggle to meet rising demands of students, faculty and researchers. There are also issues of copyright in digitizing material from the last century that prevent us from making certain work available over the Web. We are still attempting to navigate this new terrain, but ultimately the possibilities inherent in digitization far outweigh the potential pitfalls.
Over 2,000 years ago, the great Roman orator Cicero spoke presciently about our responsibility to the past – “Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.”
Today, Cicero’s admonition continues to motivate all of us in academic life to discover new and more vibrant ways to expand the scope of human understanding. Digitization is an important tool in this process, as it lets students of history, science, and culture experience the past with greater ease and immediacy.
It is true, however, that a digital image is no match for a physical document. Nothing can equal the sensation of actually seeing something tangible. To touch one of these treasures is to feel in some infinitesimal way, be it in the looping gait of the “A” in Lincoln’s signature or the litany of names in the personnel files of the Gorham Manufacturing Company, that these are not simply relics of the past, but a vital part of an everlasting present. I invite you to see firsthand what we are doing to preserve our shared heritage by visiting: http://dl.lib.brown.edu.

“Peculiar Institutions: Brown University looks at the slave traders in its past”
By: Fitzgerald, Frances, New Yorker, 9/12/2005, Vol. 81, Issue 27
Read this recent article online via the Library’s subscription to Academic Search Premier at: http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=18158174
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