The library is legally owned by the Brown Corporation, but the library was established as a semi-autonomous institution, with its own administrative funding, endowment and structure. As such, it is not a part of the University library system. The fellows' research takes advantage of the library's collection of materials relating to European discovery, exploration, settlement and development of the Americas and the indigenous response to European conquest. Most of the fellows are chosen by the Brown Faculty Liaison Committee to the JCB, which was created in 1981 to strengthen ties between the library and the Brown faculty. There are some 20 fellows a year, with four applications for every fellowship.
Fellows can be predoctoral students working on their dissertation, junior or even senior faculty.
The only requirement is that scholars come from further than 50 miles from Providence. Their disciplines are diverse, with history, anthropology, Spanish and Latin American literature being the most common. The fellows hail from more than a dozen different nations. During the Cold War, the library was one of the few Western research centers to have scholars from the Soviet Union and Bulgaria in residence. The fellows receive stipends financed by outside grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other agencies as well as by the JCB's own eight endowed fellowships.