The John Carter Brown Library and COVID-19

The JCB closed to staff and the public on March 16, 2020. As you know, we took this step of closing the Library to the public, staff, and researchers out of an abundance of caution and after careful consideration.

Those values have continued to guide our reopening plans at the Library as well. We are happy to say that as of mid-August, we have welcomed members of our cataloguing, digitization, readers' services, and curatorial teams back into the building. Our priority has been to emphasize digital conversion of the collection and make possible on-demand digitization for external researchers. And just this week, in early October, we have begun welcoming our researchers back into our reading room as well.  

The Library remains virtually available to researchers, students, library staff, and the general public through our digital platforms. Please take this opportunity to discover our collection, review our past exhibitions, or connect with our digital collections. Link up with our Instagram page, to see some of our more visually engaging posts from the past several months. We will continue to post beautiful images from these works as our talented digital team continues its work over the coming weeks.

In the coming months, we will also be selecting special items from the Library's digital materials to highlight, even as we continue to develop a new digital platform for engaging with all of our materials in the coming months. In the meantime, our Internet Archive platform - with more than 14,000 digital items - can be accessed virtually, as can our Archive of Early American Images and Maps collections on the Luna platform.

These continue to be complicated times. But the entire staff of the John Carter Brown Library remains committed to maintaining and even expanding access to our resources during this period, and we look forward to accompanying you - our global community - through this moment of extraordinary challenges for all of us.