What book comes to mind as impacting you the most during your time at Dartmouth, and why? When we asked this year's graduating library student workers that question, the results were as unique and special as they are. In this exhibit, we highlight 13 of the 28 students who submitted selections, with some sharing what their chosen book means to them. Sometimes intimate and personal, other times philosophical or pragmatic, their words offer you a peek into their world, reflecting their time at Dartmouth.
Empower
My past two years working at Dartmouth Libraries have been deeply impactful for me, to say the least. As I near the end of my time as the Digital Library Fellow, I can’t help but muse on what I witnessed libraries to be: as book-lending institutions, as facilitators of societal/cultural knowledge, and as builders of community and welcoming spaces.
Before this fellowship, I had no experience working in libraries, despite being a dedicated patron from as early as I can remember.
Over the past five years, Rauner Special Collections Library has been a refuge, an escape, and a constant source of wonder. Those who love this place know the magic of its collections—how flipping through a diary or paging through old files makes history feel real and alive. This nearness has power. It reveals the layers that connect us—past to present, person to person.
This has moved me profoundly. And I’ve seen it move others.
Why are some poets remembered and glorified, while others fade into obscurity? And when you do stumble upon a “nobody” poet, why research them and make their work discoverable and interpretable for others? These two questions, and a desire “to recover another feminist and political poet who was subject to erasure” formed the basis of Ella Grim '25's Stamps Scholar research project.
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What book comes to mind as impacting you the most during your time at Dartmouth, and why? When we asked this year's graduating library student workers that question, the results were as unique and special as they are. In this exhibit, we highlight 13 of the 28 students who submitted selections, with some sharing what their chosen book means to them. Sometimes intimate and personal, other times philosophical or pragmatic, their words offer you a peek into their world, reflecting their time at Dartmouth.
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.
What do I care more about, love or money? What about my parents’ expectations? Am I comfortable with all these social roles I have to play? What will happen to my reputation if I make the wrong decision? When does my privacy become creepy secrecy? Should I stay within the bubble, or strike out toward the horizon?
If these challenges ring a bell for you, you’re either a Dartmouth student, or you’re a character in a Jane Austen novel.
And the envelope, please! We were thrilled to roll out the red carpet for the inaugural Open Scholarship Commitment Award for Reproducible Research (OSCARRs) in February to celebrate community members who represent the best of reproducible research. The award spotlights Dartmouth research projects that embody the essence of reproducible research and open scholarship.
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.