Brown’s academic strategy focuses on integrative scholarship through strengthening schools, institutes, and centers in ways that have a distinctive impact on their fields and enhance excellence within the core disciplinary departments. It also commits to ensuring that we remain innovators in undergraduate education and enhancing graduate and medical education. In addition to integrative scholarship and educational leadership, Brown’s strategy emphasizes building capacity for sustaining academic excellence through diversity and inclusion, and by providing faculty, students, and staff with the physical, digital, and financial research infrastructure necessary for achieving the University’s goals.
The Library is essential for realizing Brown’s educational and research mission. It is the centralized agent for acquiring, curating, and facilitating access to the information resources and tools that are needed in the classroom, the study, the lab, clinical settings, and beyond. It is also a creative contributing partner in education and research through the work of specialist staff who guide students and assist faculty with navigating the information environment in their fields, provide instruction in tools and methods that are needed for teaching and research today, and support the ongoing management and accessibility of the new knowledge that faculty, students, and staff create.
While the Library must serve a broad array of core functions for every individual on campus, priorities for staffing needs, collections, services, and programs must respond to and reinforce the areas defined by the University as most critical for Brown’s overall academic excellence. Through consultation with leaders of the key integrative scholarship initiatives, deans of all academic units responsible for faculty and educational programs, directors of institutes and major centers, and department chairs, we are forging stronger connections and bringing greater focus to the ways that the Library can have a direct impact on their ability to achieve their own strategic goals. Enhancing integration with academic programs will also require more intentional interoperation across Library departments.
Some key areas for strengthening the Library’s academic alignment that have emerged from these discussions are:
Strategic Collection Building: Collections must grow and be developed on an integrated basis across general, special, and digital materials so that they are keeping pace with University priorities and meeting program needs for new or enhanced resources for teaching and research. For example:
- Building new research and teaching collections is central to the academic goals of some initiatives prioritized under Building on Distinction, including the Brown Arts Initiative, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the Data Science Initiative, and the Swearer Center for Public Engagement.
- Developing programs like Native American and Indigenous Studies, or growing cross-departmental interests such as East Asian studies, are also likely to require new or enhanced collection-building for research and teaching.
- At the departmental level, strategic growth and disciplinary evolution may also give priority to new areas that will require targeted investments in new subscriptions and materials acquisition.
Research Support: The Library must strengthen its technological infrastructure and augment staff expertise to meet academic needs driven by Brown’s priorities and the evolving scholarly landscape, including:
- Position the Brown Digital Repository and related metadata services as a central function for meeting the University’s growing needs to maintain, discover, access, and disseminate creative work, scholarly outputs, and research data generated by faculty, students, and staff — not least in response to emerging norms and new imperatives for open access data management.
- Advance the capabilities of the Center for Digital Scholarship to support the growing number of scholars from across the university using or seeking to learn advanced digital methods for the development and presentation of their research.
- Expand staffing capabilities to provide more effective support for clinical research, practice, and education, and to address strategic opportunities for partnerships with the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics.
Knowledge Support: The Library’s role as an education provider through workshops, course sessions, consultations, and other activities to advance knowledge and skills in information management tools, research methods, software carpentry, digital literacy, and information literacy more broadly should be more closely connected with curricular and program needs. This will involve collaborating with the relevant schools, institutes, centers, departments, and academic support units to reach audiences at scale and at the appropriate junctures in their educational or research process.
Diversity and Inclusion: The information resources that the Library furnishes to support teaching and research at Brown must be fully consistent with the University’s commitment to diversity and inclusion while also serving to advance our institutional goals in this area, including:
- Collections priorities should emphasize, as the DIAP calls for, “scholarly resources to support education and leading-edge research on issues of race, ethnicity, inequality, and justice around the globe.”
- The Library should incorporate and advance new inclusive methods for conceptualizing and describing existing and new resources that bring diverse content to the fore and help repair historic inequities.
- Library study spaces and digital information tools should be accessible and responsive to diverse needs of the campus community.
Co-Curricular Student Employment: With around 150 student employees each year, the Library is the fourth largest employer of students at the University. At its best, work in the Library provides students with new ways of understanding the knowledge systems that underlie teaching and scholarship. All work in the Library should be an educational opportunity as well as a pecuniary one, and we should consciously design student employment with co-curricular goals in mind.
Community Engagement: The Library can play a greater role in the University’s work to make Providence and Rhode Island more culturally, academically, and economically vibrant. This includes thinking more systematically and strategically about the information needs of faculty, students, and staff practicing engaged scholarship and public scholarship; our existing partnerships and activities around exhibits, K-12 education, and civic education; and how we can forge stronger professional connections with area libraries and local organization archives.