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Brown University Library Retrieves A Long Lost Sword
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia entered a judgment Tuesday, June 4, 2013, confirming that Brown University is the lawful owner of a Civil War-era silver Tiffany presentation sword — the Rush Hawkins sword — reported stolen from the University’s collections in 1977.
Col. Rush Hawkins led the 9th New York Volunteers — “Hawkins’ Zouaves” — during the first two years of the Civil War. Fifty prominent New Yorkers, including the governor and the mayor, recognized his service with a Tiffany silver presentation sword. The sword includes a figure of a Zouave carved into the grip and a list of the 9th New York Volunteers’ battles inscribed along the blade. It was presented to Hawkins in May 1863.
Hawkins went on to great financial success as a lawyer in New York City and became one of the world’s leading collectors of incunabula, early printed books. He had long-planned to build a library to house his impressive collections. After the death of his wife, Annmary Brown, the grand-daughter of Nicholas Brown, after whom the University is named, Hawkins wrote, “No words at my command are equal to the expression of my desolation and loneliness. Existence now is tolerable only because linked with sweet memories of the past.” He then re-conceived of this library as “The Annmary Brown Memorial,” a repository and crypt noting, “It is first of all a memorial to a woman of noble character. It is secondarily a collection of art treasures.” Hawkins endowed the Memorial with his collection of incunabula, paintings, and artifacts of his Civil War service, including the Tiffany sword.
Today, the Annmary Brown Memorial‘s collections are an invaluable resource for scholars of Renaissance learning and for art dating from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. The sword will return to Rhode Island this summer after 36 years away, during which time it resided in at least four private collections. Its journey home to Brown follows legal proceedings that lasted nearly two years and recovery efforts of more than two decades.
The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world. http://library.brown.edu/
Contact: Mark Nickel | 401-863-1638### -
Brown University Library Joins HathiTrust Partnership
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Providence, RI [Brown University] – Brown University Library has become the newest member of HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org), a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. Brown University Library will join HathiTrust as a sustaining partner.Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than sixty partners. Over the last four years, the partners have contributed more than 10 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through a number of means including Google and Internet Archive digitization and in-house initiatives. More than 3 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web.HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. Second, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching access to public domain volumes, and searching access to volumes still in copyright. Specialized features are also available which facilitate access by persons with print disabilities, and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into “collections” that can be searched and browsed.
Brown University Library looks forward to membership in HathiTrust as a means to sustain access to print works in an increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by academic institutions, provide online access to many print-only books currently held at Brown, and provide access to a wide array of scholarly resources beyond Brown’s current holdings.
HathiTrust was named for the Hindi word for elephant, hathi, symbolic of the qualities of memory, wisdom, and strength evoked by elephants, as well as the huge undertaking of congregating the digital collections of libraries in the United States and beyond. HathiTrust is funded by the partner libraries and governed by members of the libraries through an Executive Committee and a Strategic Advisory Board. http://www.hathitrust.org/.
The Brown University Library is home to more than 6.8 million print items, plus a multitude of electronic resources and expanding digital archives serving the teaching, research, and learning needs of Brown students and faculty, as well as scholars from around the country and the world. http://library.brown.edu/
Contact: Andrew Ashton | Andrew_Ashton@brown.edu | (401) 863-2669 -
This Year’s First Readings Book Has Been Announced
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This year’s First Readings book is Beautiful Souls by Eyal Press. Here are a few things of note about Beautiful Souls and the First Readings program.
- The library has created a website as a part of the First Readings Program.
- Beautiful Souls explores situations where ordinary people have gone out their way to resist authority in order to do the right thing.
- Eyal Press, author of Beautiful Souls, is a Brown Alum.
- Eyal Press will visit the campus in the fall to speak to the first-year students.
- This is the First Readings program’s seventh year.
- The First Readings program provides first-year and transfer students with a common reading experience that introduces them to the pleasures and rigors of academic life at Brown University.
- First Readings is sponsored by the Dean of the College and Brown Alumni Association.
- Make sure to check out the @firstreadings twitter feed for updates.
For more information about the author, the book, or the First Readings program visit the website.