Narratives of Journeys: Digitizing the Stefanssons' Greenland Materials

May 23, 2025

two movers help Evelyn and Vilhjalmur Stefansson unpack their vast polar library at Dartmouth

The Stefanssons unpack their "polar library" collection at Dartmouth

Expanding Global Access to Dartmouth’s Arctic Collection

In December 1951, Evelyn and Vilhjalmur Stefansson made their way to Dartmouth with three railroad car-sized trucks containing a vast “polar library” in tow. Soon after establishing the Northern and Polar Studies Program at Dartmouth and adding the Arctic collection to Baker Library, Dartmouth sponsored the Stefanssons' travels to Greenland to collect as much material about Greenland and by Greenlandic authors as possible. What they amassed, in partnership with Greenland administrators and Denmark, would become valuable research and teaching material still used to this day.

During their Greenland travels, Evelyn and Vilhjalmur kept extensive notes and diaries, documenting people met and places visited. In one of Vilhjalmur's entries, he writes how Eske Brun, Chief of the Greenland Administration of the Danish government, promised to send Baker Library one copy of everything “printed or mimeographed by any agency of the government for general distribution in Greenland.” After their travels, what they collected, and their personal notes, were filed in the ever-growing “polar library” at Dartmouth.

The marrow of a polar library is in the narratives of journeys. Journeys made on foot, by dog sledge, ship, plane, dirigible and submarine - journeys made, they say, for science, discovery, trade, war, whales, gold, love or escape.^*

Evelyn Stefansson, 1960

Today, the Libraries store the more fragile artifacts, including handwritten diaries, notes, and other primary resources from the Stefanssons’ “polar library” at Rauner Special Collections Library.

Rauner Special Collections Library

Why Digitize

As Evelyn mentions, it's the narratives of journeys that make a collection valuable; but also, how we, as stewards of the Arctic materials, make those narratives accessible. By digitizing and transcribing resources, we expand access, so anyone anywhere can advance research, grow knowledge, and make new discoveries. While everyone is welcome to visit Rauner Library to access the collections in person, digitization increases the number of researchers, curious seekers, Arctic enthusiasts, scientists, and scholars who can engage with the materials. Additionally, transcription aids everyone, making it easier to read and decode handwritten (often cursive) resources. These outcomes continue to motivate Professor Ross Virginia to partner with experts in the Libraries to digitize and transcribe primary resources, like explorers’ diaries, including Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s, and Evelyn Stefansson’s extensive notes.

Ross also saw how making those primary resources available to global audiences would bridge the past and present, helping us better understand the historical precursors that bring us to Greenland’s global context today. Ross explained that Vilhjalmur’s experiences in the Arctic, his documentation, and collected materials would be a “through line” to that understanding and “a natural step in building out that story.”

Vilhjalmur Stefansson is such an important person in helping us understand Greenland’s past. His collection is critical to pulling out the threads of stories and understanding. By digitizing its contents, we can lead the way to that understanding for future scholars.

Professor Ross Virginia

The Process

So, what does it take to transform a physical item into a meaningful digital item that supports research? Experts from the Libraries Digital Scholarly Engagement and Rauner Library teams, with passionate Arctic studies students and Ross by their side, followed a series of steps to prepare the Stefanssons’ Greenland materials for digitization: thorough archival research to create a sub-collection; preserving the original items to prevent damage; photographing high-resolution digital images; and then transferring those images to FromThePage, a transcription platform for transcribing and translating digitized documents.

Lia Hansen '28

These essential steps made it possible for Samara Cary to begin transcribing and building “narratives of journeys” that would create an organized, cohesive research experience. The number of files needing meticulous attention, though, required extra help. So, Samara mentored Lia Hansen ‘28 to contribute to this vital part of the project. Lia first encountered transcription work in Ross’s class, Pole to Pole: Environmental Issues of the Earth's Cold Regions, and from then, she was hooked. For her, being part of a team digitizing Arctic diaries and other accounts helped her gain a “new, first-hand perspective and understanding of Arctic research and politics over time.”

Lia’s work was critical to the success of the Greenland digitization project. Her contribution included meticulously transcribing, indexing, and researching the people and places mentioned across the Greenland documents, cross-linking information, and writing biographies to build a cohesive and accessible narrative. When asked about her contribution to the project, Lia expressed how building individual biographies of people mentioned across the documents and contextualizing them was a “very big aspect” of why she loves this work.

She shared that her work creates one of the few preserved and available online records of their lives. That fact motivates Lia to continue searching through old Greenlandic newspaper articles and US Army records to identify and “recognize” individuals, especially Indigenous people. She states, “It is a great honor as well as a sense of responsibility that I feel to preserve their presence and make them discoverable in history.”

a FromThePage interactive map demonstrating the interconnectedness of people and places related in the Stefanssons' Greenland expeditions

The Digital Experience

One visual result of Lia’s work is in the way FromThePage creates interrelated visual network maps. When viewing one of the relational maps that results from Lia’s work, here centered around Gertie Wandel — a Danish textile artist and politician — you can see the interconnectedness of the people, places, and organizations at the time.

This interactive map (on FromThePage) allows researchers to seamlessly move from one entity to another as they build their knowledge through the various relationships visualized. It’s thanks to Lia’s rigorous research across the collection and her detailed “subject” descriptions that we can map the Greenland narrative journeys, and experience these items from the Stefansson Collection in a new way. Lia mentions that the digitized resources impact research at Dartmouth and beyond because of Stefansson’s thoughts on and interactions with the political atmosphere around Greenland at the time.

This project is important, especially with its relevance to key issues and priorities of today, such as the effects of climate change, international politics involving Greenland, and recognition and preservation of Indigenous culture. I hope completing it demonstrates how essential it is to preserve and interact with these historical primary resources.

Lia Hansen '28

Professor Ross Virginia, right, in Greenland, 2018

Joint Science Education Project students with Professor Ross Virginia, Director, Institute of Arctic Studies (far right) in Greenland, 2018

The Impact

Ross adds that the Libraries' collections are full of information that will “help students understand how Dartmouth connects to people and places around the globe, and is part of that bigger interrelated network of impact and research influence.” He notes that the US is an Arctic nation because of Alaska, and so “we are part of a group of nations that have responsibility to those communities. For Dartmouth students to be aware of that connection and to see our role in that ecosystem is vital.”

The Arctic has captured public imagination for generations. What pieces of its history: the people, places, and environment, remain unexplored? Digitizing these works is one small step in helping broaden access to these resources, bringing researchers closer to the Arctic’s narratives of journeys.

***

The Greenland Materials Digitization Project remains a work in progress that will continue throughout the Summer Term. We're incredibly grateful to all our colleagues, Professor Ross Virginia, and the students who are helping make the Stefanssons’ Greenland materials more accessible. Watch this space for more to come.

Browse Digitized and Transcribed Arctic Materials

Share

Why Digitize

The Process

The Digital Experience

The Impact