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University History: Founding of Brown University
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Brown University traces its origins to 1764 with the granting of the Charter by the Rhode Island General Assembly. The founding was promoted by Reverend Morgan Edwards, moderator of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, in 1762. Under Edward’s leadership, Rhode Island was selected as a likely site, since the colony had been settled by Baptists, was still largely governed by Baptists, and had no college. A representative of the Association, James Manning, visited Newport in July 1763, where he met with “about 15 gentlemen of the same denomination” at the home of Deputy Governor John Gardner. The plan for a college was immediately accepted and in August, 1763, a Charter was presented to the General Assembly in Newport. After postponement, a different charter was presented at subsequent sessions and granted on March 2 and 3, 1764, for the “College or University in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” James Manning went on to become the first president of Brown University, often referred to as “Rhode Island College” until 1804.
Primary sources:
Rhode Island College miscellaneous papers, MS-1C-1 (contains digitized materials)
James Manning papers, MS-1E-1 (contains digitized materials)
Secondary sources:
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Open Access Week: Learn. Share. Advance. (Oct. 24-30)
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Open Access Week is a global event, now in its 5th year, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. LEARN MORE at openaccessweek.org
A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access
by Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.
OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.
Guides to how Open Access and
For examples of how others are advancing Open Access and taking action during The Week, click here if you’re a: RESEARCHER/FACULTY MEMBER | ADMINISTRATOR | PUBLISHER | STUDENT | LIBRARIAN -
Digital Humanities Project Wins IMLS National Leadership Grant
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS), a digital humanities collaboration between the libraries of Brown University and Wheaton College, has been awarded a $250,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), to begin on December 1, 2011 and run for three years. The goal of TAPAS is to create a shared repository and a suite of publishing and preservation services for humanities scholars who are creating digital research materials using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines.
TEI encoding offers both scholars and readers significantly richer options for annotating, searching, linking, and using digital texts. However, creating, preserving, and providing access to a TEI-encoded text can be very costly, and requires technologies and expertise that are not widely available, especially at smaller institutions. TAPAS is a community-driven, contributory project, committed to open access and open-source tools and approaches for publishing and archiving. It will enable scholars to share data and interface tools with one another and with the public. The resulting archive will permit broad access and support third-party interface development.
As Andrew Ashton, Director of Digital Technologies, Brown University Library stated “TAPAS addresses the immediate needs of humanities scholars by storing and publishing their work, but it also provides a new venue for scholars working with TEI to share, discuss, and collaborate around that work.” TAPAS will add a new dimension to Brown’s text encoding initiatives, pairing Brown’s technical expertise in digital repositories with emerging developments in web publishing and data representation. By exploring the intersection of digital collections with web frameworks such as Drupal, the TAPAS group expects to develop a substantial body of highly transferable tools and knowledge. In July, the TAPAS project received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to fund initial user interface design. This new IMLS grant will enable large-scale infrastructure development to make TAPAS a reality. For more information on TAPAS visit tapasproject.org
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more about the Institute, please visit imls.gov
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Contact: Julia Flanders | Julia_Flanders@brown.edu | 401 863-2135