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.

How far would you go to find a copy of a long-out-of-print book written by a family member? For Sreevalli Sreenivasan, Th’17 and current Thayer PhD candidate, she looked worldwide before giving up hope. Then, on a whim, while searching for PhD-related resources through Dartmouth Libraries, she put in a request for the Libraries to find it. To her pleasant surprise, they did. 

Within the hallowed halls of Rauner Special Collections Library reside artifacts, ephemera, books, and papers that capture the social, historical, cultural, and economic moments of their time. Over the years, these works have launched research projects, sparked discoveries, and been integral in the creation of new knowledge. Whether you visit Rauner Library with the gentle curiosity of someone hoping to browse a particular subject, or you come with a particular item in mind, you'll leave a witness to history.

Dartmouth Libraries entered a new three-year (2025-2027) Read-and-Publish licensing agreement with the publisher Elsevier that will expand Dartmouth authors’ options for open access publishing while complying with federal mandates for public access. Under this new license, Dartmouth-affiliated researchers can now publish openly in eligible hybrid journals without paying article publishing charges, while also retaining access to over 2,400 Elsevier journals through the Libraries.

We are awash with data. Eighty percent of that data is unstructured, and that number is growing between 55 and 65% annually. Case in point, in 2022, 500 hours of video content were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Much of this unstructured data is text or “natural language” data, and accounts for approximately three-quarters of all recorded digital data. “Text” includes, but is by no means limited to, websites, blogs, social media posts, research papers, news articles, and transcripts.

In partnership with Rauner Special Collections Library - and with the help and expertise of Instrument Core Facility Manager Paul Defino and Instrument Specialist Chris Snyder of the Chemistry Department - senior lecturer Jenny Lynn is embarking on an exciting scholarly investigation.

Dartmouth Libraries website’s last major iteration was seven years ago. Since then, the Libraries’ role in research, teaching, and learning at Dartmouth and beyond has dramatically changed. With ever-shifting landscapes in technology, particularly cloud computing and artificial intelligence, the research lifecycle and publishing, federal research mandates, accessibility standards, and a growing demand for seamless digital experiences, we knew a more robust and future-ready website was needed.

More than 1,000 days into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, resistance to the war still buzzes across Dartmouth. Spearheading these efforts are two Ukrainian professors, Victoria Somoff, associate professor in the recently renamed East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies department, and Lada Kolomiyets, visiting professor, at Dartmouth.

Among Professor Emerita of History Marysa Navarro's collected papers, photos, memorabilia, and audio/visual materials meticulously archived by the Rauner Library team, Jill Baron examined a wealth of primary resources from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

From October 21 through 25, Dartmouth Libraries are hosting a series of events as part of International Open Access Week. This event brings together universities, research institutes, and publishers committed to “Community over Commercialization,” prioritizing “approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.”