Journal, week 0
I’m having my professional field experience (my “internship”) at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. Onsite staff call it the JCB so I’ll follow their lead. It’s a private library located on the Brown University campus; it describes itself as “an independent research library dedicated to the study of the early Americas” (John Carter Brown Library, n.d.) and while it is owned by the Corporation of Brown University it is, according to the university, “independently administered and funded” (Brown University Library, n.d.) and operates without direct funding or control from Brown. The internship does not begin until next week, but my site supervisor, Allison Rich, had invited me to the library to introduce myself to the staff and familiarize myself with the space. I’ve just arrived home yesterday from a trip to Arizona so I have to admit I’m jetlagged and the visit felt like a whirlwind; luckily, it is vacation season, so I wasn’t meeting everybody at once.
Allison met me at the entrance to JCB around 10 AM and welcomed me in. I had not been on Brown’s campus since 2024 and was very conscious of the increased security in all of the university buildings… Of course, this meant Allison had to welcome me in past the guard.
Beyond the reading room, the library is deceptively large, extending down onto two lower levels levels (one being the ground floor, the other the basement). On the ground floor are several meeting rooms, workspaces, and offices, including the offices of José Montelongo, the Maury A. Bromsen Curator of Latin American Books, and Kimberly Toney, Coordinating Curator for Native American and Indigenous Materials. Part of what interested me about JCB was seeing that they have staff dedicated to curating materials from an anticolonialist perspective. The basement houses the preservation room as well as two cataloging offices—I’ll be spending most of my time here when I begin my experience in earnest next week. My desk wasn’t set up but a few of the librarians had set aside some materials that needed work—cataloging, re-homing, deaccession.
I stayed for about an hour, just enough time to say hello to everybody, then confirmed I’d be in next Monday morning to begin in earnest.