Teddy Roosevelt library to rely on digital efforts

This 1886 photo provided by the Library of Congress via the Theodore Roosevelt Center shows Wilmot Dow, left, Theodore Roosevelt and William Wingate Sewall posing near the Little Missouri River in Western garb. Roosevelt met the pair of men in Maine where they acted as hunting guides to a young Roosevelt. The former president later asked Dow and Sewell to manage his Elkhorn Ranch in the western North Dakota badlands. The ranch remains in what is now the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in North Dakota has been archiving notes, letters and photographs of Roosevelt since 2007 and is working to open his presidential library by 2019. (AP Photo/Library of Congress via the Theodore Roosevelt Center)Library of Congress via the Theo

BISMARCK, N.D. -- Theodore Roosevelt's love of the country's untouched, natural beauty spurred him to create and conserve hundreds of national forests, parks and monuments during his presidency.


His legacy, though, is being preserved digitally.


A group of scholars and Roosevelt admirers has been scanning his papers and artifacts for years and is finalizing a design for a library and museum commemorating the life of the 26th president. Unlike the presidential libraries that came before it, however, the library will feature a primarily digital collection.


The physical library is expected to open in 2019 in Dickinson, a city of about 20,000 residents near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which includes land that once was his. However, the library has already made thousands of notes, letters and photographs available online.


The National Archives in Washington, D.C., oversees presidential libraries from Herbert Hoover on, but any library for a president prior to Hoover must be built and managed without the help of the government. The oversight of the archives helps to create a central location for the more recent presidents' papers, while those of earlier presidents are often scattered across the country in private collections and in archives.


To overcome this, the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, which is spearheading the library project, has digitally archived about 50,000 documents, including notes, letters and belongings. It hopes to have hundreds of thousands more in the collection that grows every week.


"It's very difficult to create a traditional presidential library for TR, because all the materials will never be gathered physically in one place," project manager Sharon Kilzer said.
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