Stewarded by a team of specialists, Rauner Special Collections Library houses over 100,000 rare books, millions of manuscripts, and the extensive Dartmouth College Archives. The team collaborates and partners with students, faculty, staff, and the archive-curious at Dartmouth—and across the globe—to accelerate research and advance scholarship. Come and get hands on with us!
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This time of year, we're getting pretty wistful for spring. As such, we've been looking at books on flowers and we have a lovely one to share today. Margaret Roscoe's 1829 Floral Illustrations of the Seasons is just what it sounds like: a series of botanical illustrations, each accompanied by a brief description of its classification, cultivation, and history. Prior to this work, Roscoe (née Lace) illustrated another botanical text written by her father-in-law, William Roscoe.
Students in Rauner Library preparing items for exhibit.
Enhance learning with hands-on exploration of primary sources!
Utilize our materials to:
Whether you need a single session or a full term, let’s tailor the experience to fit your class.
Contact us at rauner.reference@dartmouth.edu.
6065 Webster Hall
Hanover, NH 03755
Peter works primarily with rare published resources (monographs, serials, broadsides, artists' books, scores, etc.), ancient and medieval manuscripts, two-dimensional visual resources (prints), realia, digital resources, and collections of materials. He researches bibliographic, archival, and other aspects of these resources and creates metadata using national and international standards.
Morgan Swan is the Special Collections Librarian for Teaching & Scholarly Engagement at Rauner Special Collections Library. He facilitates class visits to Rauner Library, supervises special collections public services, and coordinates special collections outreach efforts to the campus and community. Morgan has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University and received his Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He grew up in Macau, China, and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Since arriving at Dartmouth in 2004, Jay has worked to integrate Special Collections into the intellectual life of the College through intensive curricular use of the collection. He is an advocate for hands on learning and creating meaningful connections between the past and the present with rare and unique materials. He is the author of “The World’s Best Books”: Taste, Culture and the Modern Library and holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Vi joined Dartmouth in 2018 as the Records Analyst specializing in the examination and evaluation of systems and procedures related to the creation, processing, storing and disposition of records. She works with College departments and offices to ensure the integrity, accuracy, and safekeeping of institutional records.
Vi has a B.A. in History from Shippensburg University and a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned the designation of Certified Records Analyst (CRA) in 2021.
Val Werner is the coordinator of the Historical Accountability Student Research Program. He was formerly the 2021-22 Edward Connery Lathem '51 Special Collections Fellow. He grew up in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania and has been part of the Dartmouth community since 2016.
Charlie (they/them/theirs) joined Rauner Special Collections Library as a Processing Specialist in February 2022. They graduated from Brandeis University with a B.A. in 2016, and earned master's degrees in history and library science (archives management concentration) from Simmons University in 2021.
I joined Rauner in December of 2025 after 2+ years in Access Services. Very recently I worked as a freelance indexer, mostly of scholarly books; prior to that I taught Introduction to Hebrew Bible and biblical Hebrew. I live with my spouse Tim and cats Dayenu and Pip in the valley below Mt. Cardigan, where I cultivate an asparagus patch and forage wild foods. Ask me about eating milkweed!
A ’25 from Brookline, Massachusetts, Sophie studied English and neuroscience at Dartmouth and is interested in how literary and cognitive fields approach understanding thought, perception, language, memory, and development across species.
Special Collections played an integral role in her undergraduate experience: revisiting her favorite childhood stories in a ‘Victorian Children’s Literature’ course through the richly illustrated first editions at Rauner reignited a curiosity that evolved into extensive research with the archive’s holding of Rudyard Kipling’s short story collection Wee Willie Winkie: and Other Child Stories and culminated in a senior honors thesis titled, Forty Winks Later: The Dream of the Nation in the Children’s and Adult Literature of Kipling and Rushdie.
As an undergraduate assistant at Rauner during her senior year, she paged materials for classes on a range of topics she wouldn't have explored in her own coursework, from medieval bestiaries to 1920s foxtrot scores.
An aspiring educator, Sophie strives to create a learning environment that sparks students’ curiosity so they are also excited to return to Rauner Library and investigate the collections further. She is focused on creating innovative pairings of materials and active learning activities that supplement students’ analytical toolkits, making the subject(s) they study more tangible by foregrounding the essential relationships between form, content, and audience.
Sophie has designed and facilitated classes for ‘Romantic Era Literature and Frankenstein,’ ‘The Rise of the Novel,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘U.S. and the World from Independence to 1865,’ and constructed sessions for visiting groups on WWI French-American correspondence and Robert Frost poetry.
Building off her passions for children’s literature and genre theory, Sophie is currently processing a previously un-cataloged collection of artworks by Victorian children’s and adult illustrators, including H.M. Brock and Hugh Thompson. She is also curating an exhibit on Transportive Literatures, which will explore escapist genres and portable literary forms to consider the impact of when and where we read on our engagement with narrative.
