Library Core Values
In seeking to achieve greater excellence in order to advance the University’s strategic goals, the Brown University Library staff is guided by the following values:
- We affirm and support Brown University’s mission to serve the community, the nation, and the world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry.
- We value and encourage a diverse community that includes a full range of perspectives and cultures.
- We uphold the principles of free speech, open inquiry, and open access.
- We aim to provide the highest quality service to our academic community.
- We work together as a team for the benefit of the University.
- We value innovation and flexibility in finding creative ways to support and engage with the Brown community.
- We create and maintain spaces in which academic activities and community life may be freely pursued in a climate of mutual respect, tolerance, and understanding.
Organizational Investment
One of the Brown University Library’s four core strategic objectives, as outlined in our Strategic Plan 2019–2024, is “Organizational Investment”:
- The Library will become a more effective organization through ensuring that all staff have the training, tools, and support they require to make outstanding contributions to Brown’s academic community. As a learning organization, the Library will strengthen departmental structures, create cross-departmental teams, and update technological capabilities to meet the operational requirements for achieving our strategic goals.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Library’s work is essential for realizing the University’s commitment to cultivating an open intellectual environment for deep inquiry and free expression while also ensuring that all individuals, and the wide range of experiences and views they represent, are valued and treated with respect. Moreover, the Library has a unique and deeper contribution to make toward, in the words of the Pathways to Diversity and Inclusion action plan (DIAP), “breaking down historic structures that impede all of this, and creating new ones that make a better future possible. It means advancing teaching and scholarship about power, privilege, and justice in contemporary and historical contexts, so that the injustices of the past do not continue to shape our lives.”
The development, practices, and structures of research libraries reflect those of higher education — and of the organization of Western knowledge generally — in their failure to be fully inclusive. As a core facility for the discovery, communication, and preservation of knowledge and understanding at Brown, the Library has a major responsibility for confronting and working to overcome the legacies of marginalization or exclusion on campus and beyond. Library-wide goals reflect the University’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as reflected in the backgrounds and experiences of our people as well as our approaches to the materials, methods, and accessibility of scholarship.
The Library is striving to become a more diverse and inclusive learning organization through actively recruiting, developing, retaining, and supporting staff with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that enrich our collective capability to serve the campus as conductors, creators, and caretakers of knowledge.
Library Human Resources and Organizational Development Department
Staff are the Library’s greatest source of strength. The Library’s Human Resources and Organizational Development department provides our internal staff with comprehensive human resources services in the areas of recruitment, employment, employee relations, and professional development in support of the Library and campus goals and programs.
Questions related to completing the federal form CC-305 or requesting accommodations at the application, interview, or employment stages of the hiring process can be directed confidentially to Employee Accessibility Services: Leave_admin@brown.edu. The University’s ADA employment policy also provides additional information.
If you have questions related to employment at Brown University Library, please send an email to: libraryhr@brown.edu