BruKnow — the Library’s updated search and catalog system named by Brown students — went live on August 18, 2021, delivering enhanced searching capabilities.
Interested in helping the Library refine BruKnow? Sign up for user testing! All Library patrons with current access to the catalog are invited to participate.
Why a New System
The software company ExLibris acquired the company that provides the Library’s current system (including Josiah), which dates back to the 1990s. The Library decided to proactively migrate to the integrated library system offered by ExLibris, known as “Alma,” and its search counterpart, “Primo.” BruKnow is the Library’s Primo. ExLibris has been working with Library staff to customize the system for our unique catalog and users.
Enhanced Searching
The updated system will yield more extensive catalog resource results, offer more refined search tools, and provide many user-friendly features like saved searches, notifications for new items relevant to saved searches, smart spelling correction, virtual browsing of physical items, and “best bets.”
BruKnow the Name
Undergraduate students Isabel Kim ’22 and Michal Loren ’23 each individually submitted “BruKnow” as a name suggestion during the students-only naming contest hosted by the Library during Spring and Summer 2021. 93 students submitted 125 name suggestions. A group of ten students composed of members of the Library Advisory Board, the Graduate Library Advisory Council, and identified through the Undergraduate Council of Students narrowed the submissions down to five finalists. 223 students voted for their favorite name among the finalists, and BruKnow was the most popular choice.
The students who suggested the names that made the short list in addition to BruKnow:
Free and open publication documents and expands series exploring origins, history, and legacies of anti-Black racism in the U.S.
Providence, R.I. [Brown University] Over the course of the 2020-21 academic year, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown, in partnership with the Office of the Provost, undertook a systematic investigation of the foundational and enduring contemporary effects of anti-Black racism in America. Drawing on the expertise of Brown scholars from a range of fields and scholarly perspectives as well as the University’s historic strength and leadership in scholarship on race, the pioneering “Race &” in America panel series generated critical engagements with society’s most fundamental and urgent questions. Investigating the role that racism plays in American public health, democracy, punishment, and more, the informed and illuminating discussions deepened knowledge and awareness in the service of promoting a more just and inclusive community and world. The “Race &” in America digital publication series amplifies the impact and extends the reach of this important and timely panel series.
Developed by the Brown University Library’s Digital Publications Initiative and in close coordination with Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the “Race &” in America digital publication series re-presents the compelling original panel discussions with expanded content and resources in an innovative, interactive format, designed to heighten understanding and broaden these critical conversations. “The ‘Race &’ series and its creative digital presentation reflect two core elements of CSREA’s vision: to foster dynamic intellectual community on crucial issues and ensure long-lasting access to ideas,” said Rose. “By offering an array of Brown faculty reflecting on the importance and complexity of the way race defines American society from slavery to genetics to art, and making it available through this interactive, digital platform with enhanced content, we’re able to contribute to ongoing conversations on these critical issues.”
The “Race &” digital publication is a remarkable example of Brown’s dedication to its mission of creating and sharing knowledge in service of society. According to Richard M. Locke, Brown University provost:
Brown is committed to conducting and disseminating widely consequential research designed to elevate awareness of pressing societal issues and contribute to meaningful change. The “Race &” in America series is emblematic of this commitment. Over the course of a year, we have shared Brown’s faculty expertise in the interwoven areas that define and perpetuate anti-Black racism in the U.S., and through this engaging digital delivery, we’re able to amplify and extend the impact of these important contributions.
As an open access publication, the digital series provides enduring, barrier-free access to information, and has been developed with universal design principles for equitable use by all persons, including those with disabilities. In addition, the series features responsive design — readable on all digital devices, from smartphones to desktops — and robust highlighting, annotation, and sharing tools that encourage deep reader engagement and allow users to interact with one another.
Each of the eight volumes in the digital series includes:
A recording of one of the 90-minute panel discussions that took place throughout the 2020-2021 academic year
Student Voices podcast episodes in which Brown University students engage the panelists in follow-up discussion
Recommendations for entry-point materials on the subject
Multimedia resource collections of readings, online exhibitions, podcasts, and other materials referenced during the panel discussions
Suggestions for further exploration
“The ‘Race &’ in America series is an important step forward for Brown’s leadership in both scholarship on race and digital scholarly publications,” said University Librarian Joseph Meisel. “It ensures that the penetrating perspectives and fresh critical analyses advanced through this remarkable academic initiative are not simply preserved as a video link on some website, but rather rendered more fully in a format that sustains and broadens the impact of this essential work for education, further research, and public understanding.”
Brown’s Digital Publications Initiative — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s path-breaking Initiative is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.
Questions about the “Race &” in America digital publication series or the Library’s Digital Publications Initiative generally can be addressed to Allison Levy, Digital Scholarship Editor ([email protected]).
“Return of Indians,” Mosquito Shore registry of enslaved Indians, 1777. CO 123/31/125. The National Archives, UK.
The Library has been contributing to a community-centered database project led by Professor Linford Fisher that seeks to document the many instances of Indigenous enslavement in the Americas between 1492 through 1900. Formerly entitled, Database of Indigenous Slavery Archive (DISA), the project is now named, Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas.
Since the summer of 2019, with guidance from Professor Rae Gould and Lydia Curliss, Physical Sciences Librarian and member ofthe Nipmuc Nation, the team has been working with Native partners from twelve different tribal nations in the southern New England area. Together, the collaborators decided to change the project name to one that reflects the efforts and goals to decolonize the project and become more community and Indigenous centered.
Rather than simply make accessible the records of Indigenous people who were enslaved, the project is designed to offer a decolonizing framework that explores the 21st century impact of enslavement that has ruptured the relations of Indigenous people, families, and nations. In short, stolen relations. The project recovers the stories of Indigenous enslavement in order to bring to light the stories and to contextualize them within the larger context of settler colonialism.
Because the team is largely collecting archival documents about indigenous enslavement that are written by the colonizer, it is essential to indigenize the presentation of the database so that there is a decolonizing context around the language from archival documents. For example, rather than simply list “tribe” affiliations, as is sometimes listed on the original document, the database will provide information on how archival documents often include terms that diminish the nationhood and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples (such as the word “tribe”). And in many cases, the tribal/national affiliation of enslaved Natives was completely erased. The project intends to reassert the nation-to-nation relationship that tribes have, and center that context alongside the data.
In this early phase of the project, the database is not yet public — though the project website is public. The team is working with tribal partners and a group of researchers to identify, enter, and interpret relevant historical and oral historical materials, and is currently looking to partner with individuals and institutions who are willing to send materials they have or join the research team to input materials directly. Please visit the project’s Contribute page or contact Linford D. Fisher to learn more.
Stolen Relations has been generously funded and supported by the following entities:
Changes Coming to NCBI Login Accounts in June 2021
Beginning in June 2021, NCBI will no longer have a direct login option (username/password). This change is occurring to improve account security by using third-party logins. Your NCBI account is used to access MyBibliography, SciENcv, and MyNCBI.
If you currently log in to MyNCBI with a username and password, you will need to add an additional login path to your account. This will not change anything saved in your account — it will simply add different login credentials.
To update your account, first login to MyNCBI:
Then click your account name in the top right hand corner:
Click “Account settings”:
Under the “Linked Accounts” section on the following page, click “Change” to add an account. Note that the “Native NCBI” account option will no longer be available to be used as a login after the June cutover.
You can use your Brown shibboleth login, or an additional third party login such as Login.gov. If you anticipate changing organizations in the future, you may want to choose Login.gov or ORCiD. If you have NIH funding and an eRA Commons account, you should use the same login mechanism for both. Search for Brown or Login.gov, and click the result to continue configuring the login.
The Library is offering a new web hosting service to support digital scholarship: Digital Scholarship at Brown. This service is available to Brown students, faculty, and staff who want to experiment with digital scholarly platforms, develop a research project, and/or share your work. Digital Scholarship at Brown complements Brown’s existing web offerings such as Brown Blogs, Canvas, and Google Sites.
How to Use Digital Scholarship at Brown
This service allows you to manage your digital research and digital presence — including digital projects for theses and dissertations, storytelling, group collaboration, and public scholarship. Through Digital Scholarship at Brown, you can manage a Brown subdomain of your own onto which you can easily install applications like WordPress, Omeka, or mySQL along with specialized plugins, as well as access the command line directly (with some restrictions) so you can run software and develop stand-alone web sites.
When you leave Brown, you may continue to own and manage your site by transferring your Digital Scholarship at Brown domain to a personal Reclaim Hosting domain, or to another hosting service.
How to Apply
If you are interested in the Digital Scholarship at Brown service, please look over the guidelines for use. Does your project that fits the guidelines? Fill out the application and click Create to get started!
Service Issue Reported – EBSCO eBooks – Full Book Download Disabled
Service Issue Reported – EBSCO eBooks – Full Book Download Disabled
New incident: Investigating We have discovered an issue which requires us to temporarily disable full eBook downloads. Users will not be able to download EBSCO eBooks or Audiobooks at this time. We will post updates as we learn more and apologize for the inconvenience.
The University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, together with the Digital Publications Advisory Board, are pleased to announce the selection of the next four long-form scholarly works to be developed as part of Brown’s Digital Publications Initiative.
Charrise Barron, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music
The Platinum Age of Gospel by Charrise Barron, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music, surveys the American national gospel music scene from 1993 to 2013, tracing a shift away from discourses rooted in the lived experience of race-based suffering toward a post-racial orientation that catered to mainstream audiences—a dramatic shift tied to revised theologies of salvation and sanctification. Barron’s interdisciplinary digital project, deeply engaging the fields of religion, Africana studies, and ethnomusicology, will present gospel music in a way that has never been experienced before—as an interactive, multimedia exploration of the sounds as well as the sights of gospel.
Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology
Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt by Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology, argues that partial, periodic, or total invisibility of art was precisely that quality that allowed art to be personal and to engage in social relationships, not just between living people but also across the divide of death and between the human and the divine. In looking at the complex life-histories of hidden objects in Egypt, with shifting capabilities and relationships over time, Bestock takes advantage of the digital environment to examine the role of vision in manipulating relationships of knowledge and power both in ancient Egypt and the modern day.
Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture and Media
The Sojourner Project: A Black Studies Mobile Academy by Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture and Media, in collaboration with the Practicing Refusal Collective, an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars, foregrounds dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence, and black futurity in the twenty-first century. Structured as a digital academy that intentionally aims to exceed the literal and figurative walls of the university, The Sojourner Project convenes transnational and diasporic conversations, workshops, and art activations that create multi-directional encounters with histories of struggle and practices of refusal that have emerged in different black communities.
Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies
Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism towards Collective Liberation by Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, examines the relationship between Indigenous CHamoru activists in Guåhan (Guam) and Asian immigrant community members’ participation in contemporary social movement activism in the Pacific. Developing Imperial Unsettling as a born-digital publication will allow Escudero to create an immersive experience for the reader by integrating the book’s long-form narrative with oral histories of Guåhan decolonization activists, archival documents related to key historical moments in the decolonization movement not easily accessible to folks residing off the island, and lesson plans on the movement for use by teachers on and off the island.
With continued support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Brown’s Digital Publications Initiative seeks to advance humanities scholarship by providing a university-based approach to the development, evaluation, and publication of born-digital scholarly monographs. With oversight from Brown’s Digital Scholarship Editor, projects that are selected by the Initiative’s Digital Publications Advisory Board are developed as digital works that draw upon the capabilities of the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. These scholarly works are then submitted to leading university presses that have corresponding academic interests and the infrastructure for peer review and digital publication.
Italian Shadows: A Curious History of Virtual Reality by Massimo Riva, Professor and Chair of Italian Studies (forthcoming with Stanford University Press); and
Islamic Pasts and Futures: Horizons of Time by Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies (forthcoming with MIT Press).
Other digital works currently under development include:
The Sensory Monastery: Saint-Jean-des-Vignes co-authored by Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Archaeology, and Clark Maines, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University;
At a Standstill, Moving: Gesture, Temporality and the Interval in Performance by Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies;
Chika Sagawa, Japanese Modernist Poet by Sawako Nakayasu, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts; and
Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past by Renée Ater, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Africana Studies.
To learn more about Brown’s digital scholarly publication program, contact Digital Scholarship Editor Allison Levy ([email protected]).
PubMed users will notice some major changes this week. As of May 18, the biomedical literature database is now defaulting to the new, redesigned interface. As always, the best way to see Brown University’s full text options is with the Library’s custom link.
New interface changes include:
Ability to cite references quickly in your preferred citation style format (AMA, APA, NLM, or MLA)
Option to share references via social media or a permalink
Responsive design for use on any device — mobile, desktop, or tablet — with the same features and functionality. On your mobile device, bookmark (or add to your home screen) this URL: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?myncbishare=brownu
Citations are initially sorted by the Best Match algorithm, but display preferences such as sort order and items per page can be adjusted using the “Display options” button.
Most features remain – including clinical queries, the advanced search, MeSH database, search details (on the Advanced page now), and your MyNCBI account. Additionally, you’ll be able to export citations to citation management tools (e.g., EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley) through the “Cite” feature or by sending a batch of citations to your Citation Manager.
Dear Department Chairs, Directors of Graduate Studies, and Graduate Students,
Joseph S. Meisel, Joukowsky Family University Librarian
At the Brown University Library, we are well aware that the COVID-19 public health crisis is having an impact on graduate students’ ability to study for qualifying exams and carry out thesis and dissertation research. At Brown, as is the case at universities across the country, we know that suspending all onsite activity at the Library is contributing to these challenges.
I am writing to let you know about the work we have been doing to strengthen how the Library supports graduate students under these circumstances, and to ensure that you are aware of the resources that are available to help you move forward with your scholarship.
Individual Research Help
You can connect directly with a Library expert in your area who can support your research, answer questions, provide you with digital content, and offer reliable scholarly guidance during this time of stress and uncertainty.
Increased Digital Access
Significantly expanded access to digital content is being made available during the COVID-19 pandemic. More digital scholarly content continues to be made freely accessible, and we are regularly updating our list as this happens.
The Library offers several ways to access digital content:
Through our existing systems
Search Josiah, the online catalog, for books, articles, and other materials that Brown owns or subscribes to in electronic formats.
Request items through Interlibrary Loan. Requests are continuing to be filled for articles available electronically.
Many items from our physical collection are now available electronically via HathiTrust. We have added a link to the HathiTrust version to the records in Josiah. You will need to login with your Brown University web credentials to access the content.
Library experts can help you locate materials available at Brown and elsewhere.
If you are looking for a book that exists in electronic format to which Brown does not currently have access, we will purchase that item if it is possible to do so.
Special collections librarians will seek to identify primary source material in digital format through other libraries and archives that can contribute to students’ research. They can also offer individualized consultations regarding research methods and organizing your digital research files. Special collections is working on other creative solutions to provide digital access to its collections and to connect students with digital content at other institutions. The more we know about student research needs, the better we can deploy to find solutions.
Access to Physical Materials
We recognize that electronically available materials, however abundant, cannot address all scholarly needs and that digital content can also pose accessibility challenges. At this time, most university libraries have discontinued physical circulation and loans. For the health and safety of our staff, we are unable to provide physical access to Library materials until the University authorizes onsite activities to resume.
As the University announced recently, President Paxson has charged a Healthy Fall 2020 Task Force with charting a path to the safe reopening of the campus. As the principles, process, and timeline for reopening emerge, the Library will be able to provide more information on how and when we can resume physical access to general and special collections materials. Like you, we are looking forward to that day.
***
As researchers and scholarly experts ourselves, and as dedicated partners for you and your academic programs, we keenly appreciate the challenges you are facing in moving forward with your graduate studies. The Brown University Library is committed to doing whatever is possible under the circumstances to help you. To that end, we will continue to explore new ways to provide more of the content you need. In the meantime, keep telling us what you need and we’ll do our very best!
With best wishes for your safety and wellbeing,
Joe
Joseph S. Meisel Joukowsky Family University Librarian
Leaf, Minassian Collection of Persian, Mughal, and Indian Miniature Paintings
Dis/Assemble
Dis/Assemble is a collaborative effort by graduate students from across ten different humanities disciplines to construct narratives around a continuously moving archive: the Minassian Collection of Persian, Mughal, and Indian Paintings and Calligraphies at Brown University. This collection evokes questions of assemblage and disassemblage, from sifting the extraordinary from the ordinary to practices of collecting and taxonomizing. Visitors are invited to participate in the creative act of engaging with fragments and fragmentation as they behold, imagine, and truly see the objects on view.
Opening Reception & Curator’s Introduction
Monday, March 9, 2020 4:30 p.m. John Hay Library
Discussion
“Making Meaning from the Minassian Collection” Monday, March 9, 2020 5:30 p.m. Lownes Room, John Hay Library
Guests
Dr. Navina Haidar, Nasser Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art
Dr. Maryam Ekhtiar, Associate Curator of the Department of Islamic Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dates: March 9, 2019 – May 25, 2020 & September 1 – December 15, 2021 Time: John Hay Library Hours Location: Exhibition Gallery, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence
