Please welcome Mark Baumer, who joins the library staff as the Web Content Support Specialist. Mark earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Brown and his BA in English from Wheaton College. Mark has taught creative writing to Brown Undergraduates and also through Continuing Education. He has built and designed websites for a number of years while living in both Boston and Los Angeles. Some of his writing has been published. He is the creator of everyday yeah. He once walked across America.

Erika Sevetson is our new Health Sciences Librarian. Erika comes to us from the Ebling Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she has worked since 2000. She was a Senior Academic Librarian there, with liaison responsibilities in Medical Education, Public Health, and Global Health, and also served as Ebling’s statewide Outreach Librarian.

Her other library experience includes a reference assistantship at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library.

Prior to her time at UW, Erika worked at Brown as Course Coordinator in the Office of Medical Curriculum Affairs, and before that in the Office of Alumni Relations and as Administrative Assistant for the Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences.

She has a Bachelor’s Degree from Mount Holyoke College and a Master of Science in Library Science from Simmons College.

Erika’s office will be in the Champlin Library at the Alpert Medical School.

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Bruce W. Boucek as our new Social Sciences Data Librarian. Bruce lives in Providence and comes to us from The Providence Plan, where he worked as an Urban Information Specialist.

Bruce has a B.A. in Geography and Urban Studies from Temple, a Master of Arts in Geography from Temple and is ABD in Geography at Indiana University. He has published essays in several books and in the journal Climatic Change.

Laura K. T. Stokes is the new Performing Arts Librarian. Laura comes to Brown from Indiana University where she held three visiting lectureships in Musicology and was a Graduate Assistant in the Variations Project of the Cook Music Library. Also at Indiana, she was the Managing Editor of the Yearbook of Comparative Literature.

Before going to Indiana Laura was the Assistant Head of Access Services in the Northeastern University Libraries.

Laura holds a Bachelor’s in Music from Carleton College, an MS in Library Science from the University of Michigan, and an MA in Musicology from Indiana University, where she is also a candidate for a Ph.D in Musicology.

Her office will be located in the Orwig Music Library.

The library is happy to share the news that Joseph Rhoads will be joining the staff as our new Digital Repository Manager.

Joseph was the Digital Curator at the Antonio J. Waring Jr. Archaeology Lab at the University of West Georgia where he led the development of an online, searchable, digital archive of documents, reports, maps, photos, and 3D scans of archaeological artifacts.

Additionally, he worked in visualization and GPU computing as well as in endocrinology and neuroscience modeling labs at Florida State University.

Joseph holds a MS in Mathematics (Biomedical Mathematics Program) from Florida State, a MS in Industrial and Applied Mathematics from RIT, and a BS in Computational Mathematics, also from RIT. He will be located in the Sciences Library. Please join us in welcoming Joseph to Brown.

It is our pleasure to announce that Amanda Rinehart will be our new eScience Librarian. Amanda comes to us from the USDA’s Horticultural Research Laboratory in Fort Pierce, Florida. She has an MS in Botany and Plant Pathology from Michigan State University and an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of South Florida.

Recently she has also served as the scholarly communications consultant to the Society of Nematologists and as a volunteer at the Miley Library of Indian River State College.

She has a wide range of interests including travel, autism, fragile X research, community gardening, multivariate statistics and science communication. Amanda will be located in Rockefeller Library.

It is our pleasure to welcome Jean Bauer as our new Digital Humanities Librarian. Jean Bauer is a historian, database designer, and photographer. She holds degrees in history from the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, where she is completing her doctoral dissertation, “Revolution Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.”

Jean has worked for the Archives of the New York Philharmonic and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library and has held research fellowships at the University of Virginia Library’s Digital Scholars’ Lab and NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). She has also transcribed, translated, and decrypted letters for The Papers of James Madison, designed a database for The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and served as Design Researcher for Documents Compass, a digital consulting organization for documentary editors.

Jean is the lead developer of two open source projects: DAVILA, a relational database schema visualization and annotation tool, and Project Quincy, a Ruby on Rails application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space. The flagship application for Project Quincy is The Early American Foreign Service Database, which allows researchers to trace Early American diplomats, consuls, special agents, and their clerks all over the globe.

It is our pleasure to announce that Karen Eberhart has joined the Brown University Library as the Manuscripts Processing Archivist. She received her undergraduate degree in History from the College of Wooster and her Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the University of Texas at Austin. During her career she has worked in the archives at the University of New Hampshire and Smith College. Her most recent position was as the Special Collections Curator in the Rhode Island Historical Society Library. Karen’s office is located in the John Hay Library.

We are very pleased to announce that Rachel Lapkin has joined the Brown University Library as Materials Conservator. Rachel was the Conservator at The New York Botanical Garden Library, a position she held since 2007. She also had previous experience as a conservator at the Newberry Library in Chicago, at the University of Iowa, and at Indiana University. Rachel earned her Masters in Library Science with a Specialization in Special Collections from Indiana University, 2001.