The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding

Narratives of Journeys: Digitizing the Stefanssons’ Greenland Materials

May 29, 2025

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.

Read the Dartmouth Libraries’ full story of The Greenland Materials Digitization Project here.