Theodore Roosevelt Center Reaches Major Publishing Goal

This March, the Theodore Roosevelt Center (TRC) will officially reach a goal set in 2022 of publishing 135,000 records on the digital archive. This accomplishment comes three months earlier than the projected July timeline. The publishing goal was an objective set with the awarding of a grant. “The Center’s team has worked tirelessly since 2022 to meet this goal set by the Rob Walton Foundation,” remarked Dr. Micheal Cullinane, Co-Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. “The number represents a target that challenged the team and has opened up thousands of new records to the public.”

The massive publishing goal pushed TRC to evaluate and refine its digitization processes. Initially, the TRC would only publish items with in-depth cataloging, a process that required plenty of time for detailed research and description work. TRC staff made the decision in early 2025 to publish items once they were cataloged with enough information to function within the database and continue the in-depth cataloging efforts in time. With this updated process “we were able to make them accessible to interested researchers, with the intention of returning to the records to complete them as time permitted,” said Erik Johnson, Co-Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center.

The publishing process begins with an image—usually a letter—from partners like the Library of Congress, national parks, collectors, and other organizations. The image is preserved and prepared for web use, then cataloged with details such as author, recipient, date, and format. A title, description, and subject headings are added to connect it with related materials in the database. While the TRC Digital Library mainly features letters and telegrams, it also includes postcards, newspaper articles, political cartoons, and some audio and video recordings.

This expedited process also meant the TRC could accept help from over three dozen volunteers to expedite cataloging that basic information and let staff focus on the “trickier items.” Those volunteers, along with interns, contract workers, and Dickinson State University (DSU) student workers, have helped with over 9,000 items in the TRC Digital Library in the past year. Johnson recognized the incredible efforts of all involved by saying, “the TRC couldn’t have done this without the huge amount of effort from our staff, interns, student workers and volunteers, and I’d like to thank each and every one of them for the tremendous job they’ve done to help us meet our goal.”

What’s next for the TRC? With the move to Lowman Walton Hall, the TRC was able to transport physical archives from the compact shelving in DSU’s Stoxen Library, and now the TRC staff are looking forward to digging into the items and making sure the items are secure, and the records are accurate. They will also return to digitized items and expand on the information available in the database, making published materials more usable for the researchers that frequent the TRC Digital Library. Other goals of the TRC staff include adding transcriptions to items, expanding collections holdings, and developing features for the website.

Though this major goal has reached its conclusion, the energy it created within the research community is something the TRC staff enjoyed fostering. “While staff will return to doing some of the deeper dives into items and producing the high-quality records we’re known for, we love that we’ve been able to bring volunteers from the general public into our process and help people get to experience the archival process of preserving some of these historical records,” concluded Johnson.

About the Theodore Roosevelt Center

The Theodore Roosevelt Center (TRC) originated as part of Dickinson State University’s (DSU) 2000 Theodore Roosevelt initiative; a collection of projects aimed at showcasing the impact of Theodore Roosevelt (TR)on North Dakota and vice versa. The TRC was officially established in September 2007, and digitization of documents began in 2008. The TRC digital library is an open resource of letters, speeches, film and audio recordings, news articles, photographs, diary entries, and more by and about Roosevelt. The TRC is currently located in Lowman Walton Hall at DSU.

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Written by Sarah Griffis – DSU HF Content Writer