To facilitate and encourage use of the collection, the Library offers fellowships, sponsors lectures and conferences, regularly mounts exhibitions for the public, and publishes catalogues, bibliographies, and other works that interpret its holdings. Throughout the year, the Library sponsors lectures on a variety of subjects related to the collection. Recent talks have treated topics as diverse as the role of Loyalists during the American Revolution, Caribbean New Orleans, Africans in Lisbon, and Simon Bolivar.

Recent talks have helped launch important books which have been written on material held by the Library. The publications of Carol Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Larrie Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth, Benjamin Carp, Defense of the Patriots, have all been celebrated at the Library in the past year.

The Library sponsored a conference in April 2011, organized by Steve Mentz, called "The Hungry Ocean." On literary culture and the maritime environment, the conference included talks on all aspects of maritime literature and even featured music.

In October 2011, the Library published Lawrence C. Wroth's The Way of a Ship, a valuable guide to some of the JCB's great treasures in maritime history and an enjoyable introduction to a fascinating subject. This volume brings together two of Wroth's highly regarded works on maritime history: The Way of a Ship (1937) and Some American Contributions to the Art of Navigation, 1519-1802 (1947). For many years, Wroth worked on a revision to his "Way of a Ship," but never completed it. Now John Hattendorf, the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College, has pieced together Wroth's notes and corrections to create this edition as well as supplemented it with an index and a list of the books on navigation mentioned.

The Library continues to digitize discrete collections within its wall and to make them accessible via Internet Archive. The collection of Portuguese and Brazilian books in the JCB will soon be completed.

The Library has published its Indigenous Languages of the Americas bibliography online. This database which includes the many, often unique, holdings of the JCB on native languages of the Americas was recently updated.

The Library regularly encourages its fellows to speak at a Fellows’ Luncheon, a weekly series uninterrupted since 1984. These talks take place nearly every Wednesday and are updated regularly on our Calendar page.

The Library staff prepares public exhibitions of material selected from the collections. Library’s newest exhibition features New World pharmacology and is titled, "Drugs of the Colonies: The New American Medicine Chest." Recent exhibitions may be now visited virtually, as well as in the MacMillan Reading Room. The online version serves as a record of an exhibition and ensures that our audience will be able to view the treasures of the John Carter Brown Library from any place on earth with internet access.