Brown’s leadership in research and education lies in its distinctive character, or “the Brown difference.” The Library not only facilitates and participates in Brown’s ethos of creative problem solving, intellectual entrepreneurship, and collaboration across the campus community, it strives to exemplify those values in addressing the challenges of scholarly information management and service delivery in the 21st century. Brown aspires to have all its departments be leaders in their fields, and the Library can be no exception. Particular areas of professional practice where there is continuing or emerging focus include:
Healthy Collections Ecosystem: Building and supporting library collections that are equal to the University’s goals for academic excellence requires sustained, deliberate stewardship. A continuous program of collection assessment involving faculty, students, and staff is necessary to maintain a dynamic collection. Beyond questions of resource acquisition, we must also develop innovative approaches to managing the physical collection within the available library spaces and providing materials with sustainable care. Key initiatives include:
- The Library needs a more proactive and regularized program as well as transparent criteria for managing the organization of materials in the Rockefeller Library book stacks, including improved workflows for weeding, shifting, and relocating items to the Annex. Such a program should not only ensure full navigability of the collection, but also account for service and preservation needs. Achieving this goal will be a major organizational endeavor and a labor-intensive undertaking.
- Although a significant quantity of material from the Orwig Music Library has, in recent years, been identified as suitable for the Annex and relocated there, the extremely limited physical space for collections in the building poses a constant challenge that must be balanced with program needs in music teaching and research, particularly in light of the strategic investments in performing arts at Brown. Accelerating creation of records and metadata is key to managing Orwig’s space, increasing the accessibility of music research materials, and creating a comprehensive plan for music collecting.
- In the Sciences Library, the rapid shift to the use of digital resources in the sciences allowed us to downsize physical collections and partner with the University to open up space important for advancing a number of Brown’s priorities. The remaining SciLi collections need to be as coherent as possible and should be continually evaluated in relation to program needs. More broadly, the location of educational resource offices and programs in the SciLi creates a new set of conditions for thinking about the vision and identity of the Library spaces and functions that remain. The Library should collaborate with the Dean of the College and other stakeholders to consider what kinds of new and generative opportunities for Library services and initiatives can emerge beyond mere physical colocation.
- In conjunction with strategic goals for identifying the areas where our special collections have greatest scholarly impact and building new special collections strengths in partnership with Building on Distinction initiatives, the John Hay Library needs more robust and regularized collection management practices to ensure not only the physical, but also the intellectual sustainability of its unique and rare materials. The project currently underway to conduct a comprehensive survey of the Hay collections is a first step. Going forward, the Hay will need stronger and more focused oversight for the physical arrangement, conservation, care, and description of rare books, manuscripts, and other special collections items, as well as more regularized practices for collection inventory, appraisal, backlog reduction, rehousing, and where appropriate deaccession. And while the public spaces of the Hay have been handsomely renovated and are now among Brown’s most attractive physical assets, there are persistent issues in the Hay stacks that without remediation will continue to limit our ability to care properly for our unique and rare materials.
- Alongside the needs for enhanced care and management of our physical collections and associated spaces, we also need to ensure that the ecosystem of our digital collections and infrastructure is similarly healthy. Working with partners across campus, including the Office of University Communications and Computing and Information Services, we have the opportunity and responsiblity to strengthen our digital infrastructure through strategic partnerships and initiatives. The new University website is a significant opportunity for us to align the Library web presence and functionality within a state-of-the-art information platform. Similarly, we should work with partners such as the Dean of the College’s office, the Graduate School, and the Office of the Vice President for Research, as well as partners and communities of best practice outside the University, to reimagine the Brown Digital Repository, VIVO, and other systems as central applications in a robust and extensible platform for the preservation and dissemination of research. Other initiatives include our continued participation in the Ivies Plus Libraries Confederation Web Collection Program and the creation of a state-wide hub for the Digital Public Library of America. Furthermore, we need to ensure that our capabilities for digital preservation are adequate to meet current and anticipated needs.
- The sustainability of a healthy collection ecosystem must be consistent with Brown’s net-zero goals for greenhouse gas emissions. Holistic planning should factor in environmental impacts and tradeoffs, including transportation of materials, heating/cooling demands of both physical and digital storage, and print-driven deforestation.
Resource Partnerships: While there are clear needs to continue targeted investment in building Brown’s collections locally, the networked environment also creates new opportunities for providing users easier access to a much broader range of physical and digital materials beyond our owned materials and subscriptions.
- In recent years, Brown’s Library has contributed intellectual leadership to the development of resource sharing partnerships that help us transcend the limitations on what we can acquire and support locally. In particular, the Borrow Direct network of Ivy-Plus libraries makes some 90 million items available to Brown users, and new shared investments in discovery tools will make this wealth of material much more readily accessible across the partnership. Strategic partnerships of this kind are critical for meeting the needs of world-class research and teaching, and we need to continue exploring innovative ways of making content available to our users.
- More broadly, Library staff will have to continue evolving the methodologies for identifying, describing, locating, curating, and guiding users to the information they most require as we strive to make more material and more data more easily available to individuals anywhere.
Digital Scholarship: The Library has a long history of fostering innovation in the application of digital methods to address scholarly questions, and it continues to give leadership in this burgeoning area of theory and practice.
- The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) brings together a range of services, expertise, and training activities in digital humanities, social science data, scientific data, data visualization, and other methods. As interest in digital scholarship becomes more widespread among faculty, students, and staff, CDS must evolve its vision and intellectual direction through more direct involvement by faculty, consolidating its intellectual and programmatic role as the University’s digital scholarship hub in relation to other activities on campus, and strengthening the programmatic use of the Center’s spaces and facilities.
- Partnering with the Dean of the Faculty and university presses, the Library oversees a pioneering project to develop high-impact born-digital scholarly publications. This successful pilot is a prime example of field-changing, library-based innovation that will continue to be advanced in the coming years.
Diversity and Community: The research library sector is collectively grappling with effective ways to build greater diversity and stronger community engagement practices. Consistent with Brown’s mission, history, and values, the Library has opportunities to develop novel approaches to promoting greater diversity alongside and in conjunction with enhanced community engagement. This will involve building new capacity and expertise for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the content of the Library’s work and professional profile, including collection acquisitions, description, and curation as well as building diverse professional networks and diversity-focused institutional partnerships. Some of those collections, network, and partnership opportunities will come from more intentional engagement with community organizations (such as those that partner with the Swearer Center and work with our students), local libraries, and regional educational institutions.