Brown University Library News

The Brown University Library is pleased to announce that it has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a web-based citation parsing service which will improve access to campus scholarship.

“We are very grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for generously supporting our efforts to improve services and facilitate partnerships across campus and throughout the academic community,” said Harriette Hemmasi, Joukowsky Family University Librarian. “The Mellon Foundation has been a great supporter of Brown and its libraries, and has substantially improved our resources for students and scholars. Increasingly, scholarship has taken on a virtual character and it is imperative that the University Library anticipate and respond to changes in the information landscape. This grant will go a long way towards helping us achieve this goal.”

Library staff will use the $73,000 award to improve functionality for the Directory of Research and Researchers, a service offered through the Office of the Vice President for Research, by providing OpenURL links to the scholarly content of over 40,000 citations in the directory. The new functionality will significantly enhance the Directory, which serves an important role in helping Brown faculty promote their own research activities and enables members of the Brown community to keep track of ongoing research here on campus.

“Citation management tools have become increasingly sophisticated but there is currently no product that can parse free-text citations which have been cut-and-pasted from a bibliography or which appear on a web page,” said Jean Rainwater, Co-leader of the library’s Integrated Technology Services. “The grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow the library to develop such a tool and make it available to the community of scholars.”