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Brown University Library Hires New Digital Humanities Librarian
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It is our pleasure to welcome Jean Bauer as our new Digital Humanities Librarian. Jean Bauer is a historian, database designer, and photographer. She holds degrees in history from the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, where she is completing her doctoral dissertation, “Revolution Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.”Jean has worked for the Archives of the New York Philharmonic and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library and has held research fellowships at the University of Virginia Library’s Digital Scholars’ Lab and NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). She has also transcribed, translated, and decrypted letters for The Papers of James Madison, designed a database for The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and served as Design Researcher for Documents Compass, a digital consulting organization for documentary editors.
Jean is the lead developer of two open source projects: DAVILA, a relational database schema visualization and annotation tool, and Project Quincy, a Ruby on Rails application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space. The flagship application for Project Quincy is The Early American Foreign Service Database, which allows researchers to trace Early American diplomats, consuls, special agents, and their clerks all over the globe.
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New Manuscripts Processing Archivist Hired
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It is our pleasure to announce that Karen Eberhart has joined the Brown University Library as the Manuscripts Processing Archivist. She received her undergraduate degree in History from the College of Wooster and her Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the University of Texas at Austin. During her career she has worked in the archives at the University of New Hampshire and Smith College. Her most recent position was as the Special Collections Curator in the Rhode Island Historical Society Library. Karen’s office is located in the John Hay Library.
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2011 Undergraduate Research Award Recipients
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BROWN UNIVERSITY AWARDS 2011 PRIZES
FOR EXCELLENCE IN LIBRARY RESEARCH
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Brown University Library is pleased to announce that Evelyn Ansel ’11.5 and Elise Nuding ’11 are the recipients of the fifth annual Undergraduate Award for Excellence in Library Research, generously funded by Douglas W. Squires, ’73. This award, established in partnership with the Office of the Dean of the College, recognizes undergraduate projects that make extensive and creative use of the Brown University Library’s collections, including print and primary resources, databases, and special collections. A six member review committee composed of Brown University faculty members, librarians, and a representative from the Office of the Dean of the College, selected this year’s winners and presented each with an award of $750 at a reception held in the John Hay Library on April 29, 2011.Elise Nuding’s paper “Observations on ‘the volcanick work’: A cultural biography of Sir William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegreai” is a comparative and biographical study of the Brown University Library’s copy of Campi Phlegreai (1776), conducted for Professor Karen Holmberg’s course, Archaeology Under the Volcano. The Campi Phlegraei, part of the Albert E. Lownes Collection, is a rare book of observations and fifty-four hand colored plates. It documents the eighteenth century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Using Photoshop to view digital versions of this title held in other collections, Nuding identified idiosyncrasies of each copy and developed a sense of the Brown copy’s particular “colour identity.” As reviewers stated, Nuding’s “excavation of a book…[is] a compelling research model”; she created a “seamless integration of the primary source with inter-disciplinary secondary sources.”
Evelyn Ansel’s project, “Qur’anic Manuscripts of the Early Islamic World,” was conducted as an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA) with Professor Ian Straughn. With Straughn’s guidance, Ansel explored the provenance, care, paleography, and illumination in Qur’anic folios from the Library’s special collections. She participated in the creation of a searchable digital database of prints, featuring contextual essays Ansel co-authored and documentary videos she produced. She also co-curated the exhibition Sacred Script: Qur’anic Manuscripts from the 8th to 16th Centuries in the Minassian Collection, on view through July 2011 in the John Hay Library’s second floor Bopp Seminar Room gallery. Sacred Script charts the development of calligraphic styles, considers the folios’ contemporary reception as art, and explores their materiality as manufactured objects. As a reviewer stated: “from making her own notebooks, to encoding her experience of learning Arabic and studying its significance as an art form, Evie demonstrates the connection between artistic experience and learning.”
2012 UGRA award information will be announced this December.
The Brown University Library (http://library.brown.edu) supports the University’s educational and research mission and is Brown’s principal gateway to current information and the scholarly record.
Contact: Jennifer Braga | 401-863-6913