Brown University Library News

From Martha Mitchell’s Encyclopedia Brunoniana :

On May 8, 1969, after a “marathon” meeting, the faculty voted the first major change in the curriculum since the “Ducasse curriculum” of 1947. The move toward curricular reform began with a GISP (Group Independent Study Program) which decided in 1966 to study education at Brown. In 1967 a report prepared by GISP participants Ira Magaziner ’69 and Elliot E. Maxwell ’68 called for radical changes in curriculum.

From the Dean of the College website:

Placing fresh emphasis on the “liberal” aspect of the liberal arts, the New Curriculum gave students the right to choose, the right to fail, and above all the freedom to direct their own education. For almost forty years this embrace of independence has defined Brown’s place in the landscape of undergraduate education in the United States.

An electronic version of “Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University,” published in 1968, is now available at: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/libweb/papers/maxwell.php

By Chaz Firestone
10/10/08
Andrew Bergmanson ’11 draws stares from his competitors as he pushes open the double glass doors and enters the silent room. They might feel threatened by the shamrock-green streak in his otherwise black hair – an “intimidating good luck charm” he got over the weekend – but most just seem amused by his lateness.
“I was making tea,” he says, thermos in hand. “I can’t come here without my tea.”
Knuckles crack around the room as he takes his place among the 40 or so competitors. All share a common goal with Bergmanson – to search and destroy.
Search the Internet, that is, and destroy the competition; Bergmanson is a competitor in the Digital Literacy Contest – “a high speed battle of the minds to find information online.”
Using the computer as a “cognitive prosthetic,” says contest developer and Purdue University graduate Daniel Poynter, competitors scour the Web to answer obscure questions chosen by Poynter for the cunning strategies required to solve them.
“If Napoleon Dynamite were here,” Poynter says, “he’d say something like, ‘Chicks dig Internet skills.’”

… Brown Daily Herald: Students Google competitively for cash

The Brown University Library is pleased to announce that Brown users now have on-campus access to the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. The VHA contains nearly 52,000 visual history testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, videotaped in 56 countries in 32 languages. Further information and tools for accessing the VHA collection can be found at Brown’s local VHA gateway: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/eresources/vha.php. Links for the VHA are also provided on the Databases A to Z listing: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/eresources/.”
For further information contact Holly_Snyder@brown.edu