Dean of Libraries Susanne Mehrer has been appointed to a third term, beginning July 1, 2025, Provost David Kotz ’86 has announced.
Mehrer, who was previously deputy university librarian at the University of Cambridge, joined the Dartmouth community in December 2016 and was reappointed to a second term in 2020.
“A strong library system is the heart and soul of any academic institution, and Dartmouth is fortunate to have in Susanne Mehrer a passionate, forward-looking, and collaborative leader,” says Kotz. “Sue understands the immeasurable value the Dartmouth Libraries add to our educational and research mission, and she is fully committed to making sure the library more than meets the fast-changing needs of today’s students and scholars.”
“Dartmouth is a special place,” Mehrer says. “What attracted me originally was that it’s a close-knit academic community that operates at the highest research level. There is a personal aspect to working here that I appreciate. I love that I can pick up the phone and say to a dean, a faculty member, whomever, ‘Can we have a conversation?’ And I don’t do anything alone. I have a fantastic team and incredible colleagues, and what we do, we do as a team and an organization.”
Most recently, Mehrer led the Dartmouth Libraries’ strategic planning process, which engaged stakeholders across the institution, including faculty, students, staff, senior leadership, and other campus partners, as well the Board of Trustees.
“We’ve had this amazing input from our community, and I want to make sure that we continue to translate that into action,” Mehrer says.
The strategy is built on four pillars: empowering students’ individual potential, accelerating advanced research, elevating scholarship with cutting-edge research tools and methods, and helping to amplify the impact of Dartmouth scholarship.
“We see Dartmouth Libraries as firmly part of the ecosystem of creating new knowledge. We touch on every part of the research life cycle and the learning cycle that leads our students into research,” Mehrer says. “We are directly supporting Dartmouth’s academic mission of creating new knowledge and President Beilock’s priority of advancing innovation and impact.”
Among other accomplishments, Mehrer created opportunities for Dartmouth Libraries to meet the changing demands of research in the 21st century, growing its capacity in emerging areas, including open scholarship, digital collections, research data, and artificial intelligence.
“Research is changing as we speak, and we are playing our part in making resources and expertise available, guiding our students, partnering with our faculty, and making sure that the great research that is done here can be accessed by as many people as possible,” she says.
Mehrer has championed the Historic Accountability Student Research Program, which provides intensive experiences for undergraduates to work with primary sources and archives to surface important stories from Dartmouth’s past. “It’s an amazing opportunity for students to get individualized research experience that they might not get at other institutions,” Mehrer says.
She also helped oversee the construction of a new, 20,000-square-foot Library Collections and Services Facility to increase the library’s capacity to care for its physical collections. The facility opened this summer.
“It is a purpose-built, industry-standard facility where we can now steward and curate the collections going forward,” she says. “It speaks to Dartmouth’s recognition that physical collections will always be part of the liberal arts education.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mehrer and her team prioritized maintaining access to the library’s resources.
“We never shut down,” she says.“We had to close our doors for the two months that the state had everybody close their doors, but even during those times, a small team of us were here, and we provided a click-and-collect service so that faculty and researchers still had access to the physical materials that we hold. We never stopped making our collections accessible. The staff pulled out all the stops to make sure that we can be as effective for our community as possible. And they were incredibly creative. One staff member sent out packages to students working with book arts. Special Collections rigged up a way to digitally teach a class with archival materials. It was hard, but we learned a lot—and there were lessons in there that we don’t want to lose.”
Closest to her heart, Mehrer says, was the opportunity in 2022 for the library to participate in the repatriation of the papers of Samson Occom to the Mohegan Tribe. Occom, a Mohegan scholar and minister who is considered one of Dartmouth’s founders, traveled to Great Britain in 1766 at the request of the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, his former teacher, to raise money for what would ultimately become Dartmouth College. “Being part of repairing Dartmouth’s relationship with the Mohegan Tribe was a deeply meaningful experience, and was personally very moving.”
Mehrer completed her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, majoring in English and German, and went on to earn a master’s in English and an executive MBA at Queen’s University Belfast, a postgraduate diploma in library and information studies from the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and an MA from Cambridge.
