 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the launch of the Theodore Roosevelt Center's website. I want to welcome all of you. My name is Clay Jenkinsom. I'm the Theodore Roosevelt scholar in residence here at Dickinson State University, and one of the originators of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. I want to welcome everyone here on the campus of Dickinson State University in southwestern North Dakota, just on the edge of Theodore Roosevelt's beloved Badlands, and everyone watching from around the country and around the world. I'm told by Sharon Kilser, the project manager of this Theodore Roosevelt initiative, that we have friends at Saigomore Hill who are watching, friends in Texas, possibly a North Dakota who's today at the South Pole. And so by the miracle of the internet and the worldwide web, we greet all of you and welcome you to this extremely important moment for the history of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. I want to start by bringing up the president of Dickinson State University, Dr. D. C. Costin, for some opening remarks, and to tell you that this event will take about 35 minutes, and in just a short time you will have a chance to see the website unveiled internationally for the first time. D. C. Costin. Thank you, Clay, and welcome back from all your travels. Any truth to the story going around that UTR and Elvis were spotted having dinner at the Marmouth, in Marmouth recently? At the past time. At the past time. For those of you that may not understand that, if you, you may want to check the November 20th column that Clay wrote for the Bismarck Tribune where he was talking about the travails of finishing his wonderful recently published biography about Mary Weather Lewis and the things that occur to authors near the end of that process, if you'll read that you'll understand where that comment came from. It is wonderful on behalf of Dickinson State to welcome all of you who are physically with us in Dickinson and indeed all of you throughout the United States and around the world to this, to this event. A day like today does not happen without many, many minds and hands being involved. I think first and foremost it perhaps is important to pay some tribute to Theodore Roosevelt himself. Certainly all of us are familiar with the story of his coming as a relatively young man to the Badlands, initially just for a great adventure and enjoying that first adventure when he came in early fall of 1883. And the expectation that when he came at that point that he had no idea that the set of adventures that would follow in this area would truly transform his life and ultimately have profound effects on the history of our nation, including having his visage literally carved in stone a few hours south of here. Little did he have an imagination that that might occur and we all know the story that the following year he returned and over a period of time the adventures and business and so on that he conducted in this area helped him overcome the deepest of profound personal grief from having lost his mother and his wife on the same day and also gaining a set of experiences that really provided him with the confidence that coupled with the wonderful education and his fabulous intellect allowed him to be the leader that he became who was truly bold, daring and fearless as he moved forward. A second set of folks that I think we need to pay a little bit of homage to are the folks that helped get the Theodore Roosevelt Center underway. A number of years ago a gentleman named Lee Vickers came to Dickinson State University as president and I had the opportunity a couple of days ago to have a wonderful conversation with Dr. Vickers. He wishes all of you the best and has the deepest and fondest memories of his time here but he talked about when he came to Dickinson State that his conversation said need to find something that helps Dickinson State be truly distinct and over a period of time working with many of you who are here in the room and many others who have been before determined that the heritage of Theodore Roosevelt in this area was truly that mark that could be the distinction for Dickinson State University and over the time he was here he and Deanna worked diligently on bringing things to this institution that were related and drew from the heritage of Theodore Roosevelt. The Theodore Roosevelt honors leadership program now is renowned across the country for what it prepares young men and women who spend time here in being capable of doing. A few years after that the idea of the Theodore Roosevelt Center and bringing something larger to this place came into being as I understand the story he and I North Dakota native who had been out traveling the world gaining great experience and knowledge got together that person being Clay Jenkinson and began talking about the Theodore Roosevelt Center and as part of those discussions Clay came up with the idea of making the materials and relics and heritage of Roosevelt broadly broadly available to people throughout the world and gave rise to the concept of this digital library that you will see the the public announcement of today. Sharon Kilzer came on and provided the day-to-day work that has helped carry this forward. Dickinson State moved forward to recruit Harvard University the Library of Congress and the National Park Service as partners in this effort. Support came from then United States Senator Byron Dorgan with some funding to help this come together as well as relationships with some of those federal organizations and there's been wonderful legislative support and leadership from North Dakota in helping move this project forward to the point we are today. We're thrilled to have Representative Nancy Johnson from the North Dakota legislature with us today. Dickinson State University drawing on Roosevelt's legacy has been bold and daring in the creation of the Theodore Roosevelt Center just as Roosevelt was. What a dream for an institution that many view as a small regional school somewhere way out on the prairie to undertake digitizing and cataloging the writings papers and documents of our 26th president. That was a bold and daring dream that today we see the realization of. What does what we'll see today mean as we move forward. Over the last several weeks this event was being announced several people in the community around the state a few people on campus asked me so what does this mean and I've explained to them that rather than having to travel thousands and thousands of miles you will have literally at your fingertips the ability to go into documents that have probably not been seen nor looked at and that any one of you any one of you watching or anyone literally around the world can get can begin preparing your book about Theodore Roosevelt. This truly is a remarkable accomplishment around Roosevelt but also in the way that information is provided to others. It causes me to think that perhaps in the in the words and in the tradition of another of Clay's heroes Thomas Jefferson that what we are doing is truly democratizing information information that's incredibly and valuable but also taking advantage of the latest of technology to open it up to all of us. What an exciting adventure what an exciting accomplishment you're going to see but I don't want anyone to leave thinking this is the end. There are more chapters to come. There are more dreams for the Theodore Roosevelt Center. Stay tuned and stay engaged with us. Thank you for being here. Thank you President Costin for those tremendous remarks and giving people a sense of the origins of this project. I won't speak long you've anticipated a good deal of it but but let me go back to the first of all the basic idea you know for those who are not here in western North Dakota today Roosevelt lived here for about three years depending on how you count between 1883 and 1887 and he later said that the experiences that he had in the badlands of Dakota territory were the formative experiences of his adult character and in fact in 1910 in Fargo he said I would never have become the president of the United States had it not been for the time that I spent in North Dakota and so it's entirely appropriate that Dickinson State University poised on the edge of those badlands would become the national home of the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Archive. The project was born in the badlands of western North Dakota and we're absolutely thrilled that we're able to disseminate the papers of Roosevelt from this place from North Dakota. It's really a sort of a Thomas Friedman flat world idea. Most presidents after Herbert Hoover have presidential libraries but presidents before Hoover tend not to and today if you went to the archives that the Library of Congress and Harvard and so on and asked them to give you the papers of Theodore Roosevelt they of course would decline but you can digitize those papers and leave them in those repositories and still have electronic access to them and so that was the breakthrough idea that we had and Dr. Vickers was eager to pursue it and particularly his wife Diana Vickers shepherded it through its first 18 months and so here we are our goal is a is a very audacious one we want to digitize every known scrap of Rooseveltiana every letter that he wrote every letter that he received diaries notebooks scrapbooks photographs audio film cartoons if it can be called a Roosevelt related in any direct way we intend to digitize it and in a project like this there are a number of phases the first one is the idea we've explained that the second is gathering and we are gathering Roosevelt documents from around the country and even around the world from public institutions private institutions and private individuals we have depending on how you count several scores of thousands of documents so far and before this is over we are likely to have 2 million pages of Roosevelt possibly more we're not quite sure of just how far this net will be cast but it will be a vast electronic archive and so we will continue to gather for the rest of time but particularly in the next decade once you've gathered that database is largely useless and inert until you catalog it sort it and identify it and we are actively working on that with our staff here at Dickinson State University it's a time-consuming and painstaking process but once we have provided labels what's known as metadata for each of the pages of all of the documents that have come our way they will then be available searchable by anybody anywhere on the internet and so the second phase after gathering is sorting and cataloging and labeling the third phase is dissemination and that's what brought us here today we have been working on all of this now for about four years we knew that we needed an important portal an internet site a web home where people would come from all over the world to get access to the Roosevelt documents and we knew that that was something that could not be done casually and so at great expense particularly of human hours we have now put together the foundation of a website that will continue to grow and evolve over the next few decades but we are launching it here today and so as of this moment people from around the world whether they're in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania or Penham Penn will be able to access the Roosevelt papers on the worldwide web and free and searchable 24 hours a day no travel costs required and then finally once we have gotten the idea gathered the data sorted and cataloged it and begun to disseminate it then the really interesting part begins and that's that people have uses of it and they can write biographies of Roosevelt or studies of this or that aspect of Roosevelt's lives or just spend an evening wandering around the website looking for great and interesting things about Roosevelt in other words this is a site not just for biographers and professional academics but for school teachers for K through 12 students for university students for curious people around the country and around the world for tourists it's meant for everybody and it's part of the grand democratization of culture that the internet and the electronic revolution represent and so we are actively planning to create initiatives that will appeal to a wide range of Roosevelt users from somebody who's interested in his guns and his hunting life to someone who wants to know more about the progressive era in American history and we want to serve all of those communities equally well but with a particular focus on making research tools available to scholars biographers and authors so it's exciting and it's going to take a long time and a great deal of money I just want to quickly reiterate where we are with this our formal partners include the National Park Service with its six primary related Roosevelt sites the Library of Congress which was our first great partner and then Harvard University our most recent partner the Library of Congress made available to us its 400 plus reels of microfilm we have already digitized all of that we are working our way through their photo collections we are now working our way through their film collections and we're just really getting started we don't know when the Library of Congress initiative will end but we I would estimate that we're approximately halfway through the work that we will be doing with the Library of Congress and our friend Dr. James Hudson was one of the early advocates of this project and a champion of a small institution in western North Dakota taking it up then came the National Park Service I want to thank publicly Valerie Naylor the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park for creating the initiative which brought a centennial challenge grant from the National Park Service to us and because of that we're digitizing the Roosevelt papers at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota at Roosevelt Island in on the Potomac at Washington DC at Roosevelt's birthplace in Manhattan at Sagamore Hill on Long Island and at the Roosevelt inaugural site in Buffalo New York and then we will be spreading the net still further for the five national parks that Roosevelt created and national monuments and so on so we have a great sense of gratitude to Valerie Naylor and the National Park Service and most recently Harvard Harvard has agreed to let us digitize all of their Roosevelt holdings including extremely important collections of documents relating to his youth and private life and one of the world's great photo collections related to Roosevelt so we couldn't be happier those aren't all of our partners but those are the three major partners the funding as Dr. Costin said has come primarily from the state government of North Dakota a series of three legislative grants to us and more to come the national government of the United States thanks to the work of former North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan has been generous particularly through the Library of Congress but we also competed successfully for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities a challenge grant which will help us to bring to this campus the best Roosevelt scholars in the world for periods of short residencies and we hope as permanent staff members on campus at Dickinson State and private funding has been an essential part of our success so we simply couldn't be happier we're just really getting rolling but this is a big moment for us because we are now able to share some of the treasures that we have not just with the community that we represent in Western North Dakota but with the country and to a certain extent the world so welcome to Theodore Roosevelt Center.org the portal that you will use for all future Roosevelt studies through the auspices of the Roosevelt Center on the campus of Dickinson State University so thank you so much for that now I want to introduce Sharon this day would never have come without the work of Sharon Kilser Sharon Kilser is the project manager of the Theodore Roosevelt Center more than anyone else she has held this project together and brought the discipline the creativity and the stamina to bring this project to fruition we owe her an immense debt of gratitude Sharon Kilser thank you for those very generous words Clang it's my privilege today to acknowledge the technical partners that have helped us to reach this milestone you cannot create as beautiful and functional a website as we now have without some serious computer geeks behind the scenes and we are so proud of the work that we've been able to do but it's really due to these people that are really hidden behind the scenes and so I want to acknowledge them briefly Stephen Perkins is the founder of a company called dataformat.com he was working and servicing the Jefferson Library at Monticello and as you all know Clay Jenkinson my colleague has been in the Jefferson world for many years he was well aware of Monticello's work on the Jefferson papers and through Jack Robertson the librarian at Monticello we were introduced to Stephen Perkins and to dataformat and the product that they have created you will never see it it's it's in the background but it manages all of the data that comes out to the website that you do see and because it's so well designed that what you see on the front side is very useful and it operate it functions very quickly the searches that you do are returned quickly because that database structure in the background is is really robust and we've been sort of the guinea pig for the product and it's gone through some developments through our partnership with them and so we've just been so grateful for their assistance and support and we want to acknowledge them I believe Stephen might be with us today online and so Stephen if you are again thank you next I also want to recognize two people through the state of North Dakota who helped us in the early days in the actually the selection process for that product and the ongoing support of the project Randall Thursby is the chief information officer for the North Dakota University system and he served on the committee that analyzed potential products for the database management he was his advice and counsel was very instrumental in in our choice and also Lisa Felner from the information technology department for the state of North Dakota and again I think Lisa is with us online so we're very grateful for the contribution that each of them made in that process I also want to point out that we have an ongoing partnership with the state of North Dakota for the storage of the archival copies of these files as anyone knows formats change over time and there can be you know corruption of of the files if they're not cared for properly and so when we looked around to say what's the best most secure way to manage and retain these files over time we reached out to the state of North Dakota and they generously partnered with us and the archive is managed and stored on servers of the state of North Dakota so we are grateful for for their friendship and support and work with us on the project and the last technical partner is the front end designer of the website we did a major search again what we're what we're creating is it isn't new it isn't a new idea necessarily there are digital libraries out there but what we wanted to do was create something that was groundbreaking in some ways as far as the the interaction between the primary documents and the interpretive materials and you'll see some of that in the demonstration we'll give in just a few minutes and so we looked around for a partner that would help us think big about what was possible and we selected the burned group from Baltimore, Maryland and again they've been just a wonderful partner and when you see the website in a few minutes I think you'll agree that they really embraced the beauty and the sense of place of western North Dakota and everyone who comes to the website will you'll not be able to get away without knowing this is in North Dakota so we're very grateful for them I also today have the chance to recognize and acknowledge the volunteers who have worked with the project and in a moment you'll hear from one of them so I won't say too much here but this because our entire system is web-based it allows people all over the country to participate with us and again I think we have a couple of our volunteers at a distance who are with us today for this event CJ Moore from Texas and John Olson in Iowa have been with us from the very beginning CJ through the first through the theater Roosevelt symposium and then came in as a volunteer but John specializes in the cartoons of theater Roosevelt so when you see some of the cartoons on the website you can be grateful for the contributions that John has made so with that I'm going to invite Joelle Froot who is a local volunteer to share with us a little bit about her experience in participating in the project thank you chair I'm a volunteer for the theater Roosevelt Center and right now volunteer numbers kind of fluctuate and so right now I think there are six of us and four of us are here in Dickinson now K-ware Mario and Linda hot and myself have been on this since the beginning and about a month ago Sue Jackson came in on board and we meet usually on a Wednesday afternoon and Friday afternoon and we are not floundering all by ourselves there because we have our great guru researcher Grant Carson over there to help us out and when he very rarely doesn't have an answer for us but if he did we go then to crystal and then and then the top line is Sharon Sharon knows everything so we all when we are volunteer we volunteer for a lot of different reasons basically for anybody it's you know you want to help you want to to help whatever project you're with this is an exciting project for us we wanted to help with and it means different things to all of us volunteers for me I love doing the foreign language letters when they come across French or Spanish I read the French letters and you can hear the French listening to themselves speak on the letter you know I mean this is how it comes across to me and then the the Spanish letters usually it's been the ones I've done so far have been from Cuba and then you have a little bit of a flowering language and a flattering language so this is kind of fun for me and for Linda I want like I brought my iPad because I wanted to it has become very personal for Linda because and I will read you I don't want this it says her grandmother Lulu Anderson Cornell is in the all Harvard TO collection and her goal is to digitize the letter that goes with it get them with a photo linked in catalog and the staff at Harvard has put the full description of the photo of Lulu Anderson Cornell with her birth and death dates etc and also put all the details of the photo to of her homestead that is also in the TR collection so for Linda it has become you know pretty personal and so we help each other K is a great teacher so when I found it at the beginning and I asked for help she was there for me Linda is a lot more tech and the techy moron basically so I go to Linda and Linda helps you know and so the one thing I want to to tell you about the volunteers is we have become pretty close and we have a little camaraderie there for example we all have agreed that any handwritten letters from Henry Cabot Lodge is going back in the barrel we are not doing it you can't read them and so we figured okay I'm going to be a little tacky here we figured let somebody who gets paid work with us you know but we just love doing it we love being together sometime we meet at the Alumni Foundation House and Grant meets us there with laptops just to kind of mix it a little and so it has become new friendships Linda and I discovered we like gardening K and I we know we love to travel so we talk about this this sort of thing so more than or plus being part of this fabulous project we have a very close friendship and I invite any of you to join us anytime it's easy to jump in and out and you can work from home you know you got a computer you can work for home so please any of you join us thank you it's been such a privilege and pleasure to be a part of this project and a part of that has been being able to invite others to join in and really to own it and make it their own and as Joelle expressed so well it means different things to different members who are working with us and we would like to expand the cadre of volunteers to you know hundreds we have enough work for that many people and so again those who are interested in having attention to detail and you don't need a lot of technical knowledge as Joelle pointed out that we do certainly invite that encourage others that you know to to be part of this because it's creating something very remarkable and we certainly enjoy the experiences that people have who have come into the project so again let's thank the volunteers we have had interns and and others around the country over the last couple of years and we can't possibly name them all but on the website there is a list so I'd encourage you to go there so again let's thank the volunteers and recognize all the technical partners too and let me just say another word about about the volunteers you don't have to have a PhD or a master's degree you don't need to be a historian you don't need to have even a particular interest in Roosevelt although it helps you can do a couple of hours a week a hundred hours a week you could do it in your bathroom or a tuxedo you can do it anywhere on earth we have a little training program but you don't need to feel intimidated by this because once you're in you're easily trained we do have peer review of historical interpretive questions but for basic processing of these documents we need volunteers from all over and we probably need hundreds and hundreds of them to get this job done it takes a long time to process several million Roosevelt documents and we intend to do it and the sooner we get it done the sooner it will change the nature of Roosevelt studies so if you're interested go to the Theodore Roosevelt Center.org website and it's easy enough to make contact with us and we would be thrilled for you to participate in this historic project and it's historic in so many ways we're empowering people who don't have particular credentials to be part of it it's also revolutionary in that it will create enormous efficiencies in cost and time you know if you were going to write a book about Alice Roosevelt Longworth you would have to go to Harvard and spend some time and then you would have to go to the Library of Congress and there are other repositories that you would have to go visit all these things take time they take a lot of funds there's a certain tediousness in being credentialed for these institutions and sitting with one file coming to you and then a half an hour later perhaps another file and so on we're knitting together all of this so that the things that are in disparate places will be electronically knitted together and you'll be able to follow the train of that and you'll be able to do all of this from the privacy of your living room or a hotel room or wherever you happen to be and so it will enable people who are at small institutions without without large research and travel budgets to take on extraordinary intellectual projects that would literally have been out of their reach five or ten or fifteen years ago and I think it's going to create an extraordinary change in the nature of scholarship and what we're doing is is part of a larger revolution in knowledge and learning but we think that we're now one of the pioneers and we couldn't be happier to have that role so let me just make a couple other quick thanks the city of Dickinson has played an important part in our success Dennis Johnson the mayor and Kevin Thompson is here from the Dickinson State University alumni foundation and and they have supported us in every possible way and raised funds for what we're doing so we're most appreciative there I want also to thank the staff here it's a small staff that's why we need so many volunteers Grant Carlson is one of our staff members crystal Thomas you'll hear from here in a moment Kyle Scammon and of course Sharon Kilzer and several others but that's the main staff that has that has allowed us to move forward as quickly as we have done now I'd like to introduce crystal Thomas she's a digital library coordinator for the Theodore Roosevelt project and she is actually going to unveil the long-awaited Theodore Roosevelt center.org web portal crystal as we celebrated the launch of the new website we thought we should give you all a chance to see it made a lot of sense to us so we want to give you a taste of what you can find on the website and see that there's truly something for everyone so what I'm going to do today is showcase three items from the digital library and a lot of detail and show you some of the interpretive features we have on the new site and then I'll highlight some of the different types of materials that you'll be able to see so as you can see right now we are on the homepage and we're able to highlight events and today's event is currently highlighted and we're also showcasing a very festive telegram that was sent by Quentin Roosevelt who is TR's youngest son while he was stationed in France during World War I and Quentin is usually a really interesting place to start in the digital library so we're going to go and find the rest of his collection now and we're just going to run a quick search for Quentin Roosevelt and we're going to modify it so we're only going to look in the Sagamore Hill collection the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site holds the bulk of the Quentin Roosevelt materials in the digital library and Quentin's a really interesting place to start mainly because he never left home he was killed during World War I in action and so all of his papers stated Sagamore Hill because he never left the nest and so this is a collection where you can literally look through the papers and watch him grow up and the letter I want to share with you is we're going to modify the dates a little here to find it quickly it's a letter from Quentin to his father and as you can see when you go into the digital library this is the metadata that clay mentioned helps give you a little context about the letter so you understand it more before you sort of jump in and start reading we're going to go just to the first page of the letter here you can see our fabulous zoom technology on the website and I just want to read you this first paragraph dearest father I've gotten my first real excitement on the front for I think I got a bush the operations officer is trying for confirmation on it now this letter I find intriguing because Quentin would have written it around the 11th or 12th of July 1918 and then his father would have received it after Quentin was already dead Quentin Roosevelt was shot down and killed on Bastille day 1918 so when you read the entirety of the letter you hear his excitement how proud he was about his accomplishment and I think about how heartbroken his father was to read it after he knew his son wasn't coming home and so I find all of the Quentin material is extremely compelling I was lucky enough with the catalogers at Sagamore Hill to catalog this collection from start to finish and when you read his school report cards and his school essays and his letter to his mother from Harvard all about football if you want to play by play of the Harvard football game at that time that's the letter to read you really get to see this person grow up and go off to war and never come home the Quentin Roosevelt collection is also super interesting because it hasn't really been mined all that much by scholars it's a fairly unknown collection and now everyone thanks to the digital library has a chance to look through some of the really interesting items that are here because we've had this great resource of Quentin materials we've written quite a bit about him on our blog and so when you run a search on the advanced page if there is any related items it will appear in this little portlet over here to your left and we're going to go ahead and sort of click into one of these blog posts and show you that we have gone back through some of the older ones and attached the documents we featured this one's from a year ago to their new digital library records so this is an example of how we're starting to use the interpretive materials on our site and link them back into the digital library what I'd like to do now is show you a little bit about how you can search by our subject headaches and it helps if I go to the right page there we go a really good place to start if you're not a hundred percent sure where to start in this giant collection is to check out the featured subject searches on the digital library homepage as you can see we have Christmas featured right now it's actually a really neat search you'll find some really interesting materials in there so I urge you all to go and check that out on your own right now I want to take us into books and reading and one of the reasons I wanted to feature this particular heading is it creates a collection of items that like the Quentin materials aren't very well known scholars often talk about books in terms of TR what he was reading and sort of on the periphery but these letters take you into what TR was being recommended to read what he himself was recommending to other people books he was purchasing so you really get to know TR's reader when you look at this one and the item I want to share with you in this search is a type written manuscript regarding book selection Quentin's letter was obviously handwritten this is an example of a typed one and as you can imagine it being TR he was very opinionated about what books people should be reading and I just want to share with you this last paragraph I still read a number of Scott's novels over and over again Walter Scott whereas if I finished anything by Miss Austin I have a feeling the duty performed as a rainbow to the soul but other book lovers who are very close kin to me and whose taste I know to be better than mine read Miss Austin all the time and moreover they are very kind and never pity me in too offensive a manner for not reading her myself and I'm a big Austin fan so this made me laugh when I found it but what I also find quite ironic is he loves Walter Scott who was one of Austin's biggest fans so I find that quite ironic with this particular item I do want to show you when you're on the main page for a digital library item right up here at the top is where the subjects are listed and if you find an item that's super intriguing to you and you want to read more about that particular topic all you have to do is click on that link and it takes you directly to your own sort of personal collection of items regarding that topic so it's a really interesting way to be able to browse through items that are most interesting to you so we looked at a handwritten letter and we looked at a typed essay now let's see if we can't find something a little more graphically interesting for you to look at since it's the holidays I thought I should show you at least one Christmas item and this is an item I came across earlier this week and thought it would be a fun one to share it's a cover from a magazine that was quite popular at the time it's their 1906 Christmas cover and then just zoom in here a little what I love about it is front and center are marching teddy bears and what I thought was kind of interesting is this is only 1906 the teddy bears only been a toy for about three or four years at this time and it's already considered a quite essential Christmas toy that makes the cover of a magazine so now we looked at three items one from sagamore hill one from dsu zone collections and this last one was from the library of congress and we also looked at a blog and an article to sort of show you the interpretive materials we have on the site and now what I'd like to do is show you some of the different types of documents you can find on our site and there's a really easy way to sort of browse through these you just go to the advanced search page on the digital library and you choose resource type for your field and that changes your text box into a drop down and that gives you lots of options so if you look through these and some of these won't give you very many results at the moment but some of them will give you enough results to keep you busy for the next three weeks so choose wisely the first item I wanted to showcase for you is a menu from the theater rooseville birthplace and I like it because all these little dancing teddy bears down the side are leading to a table where they're serving to our dinner he's apparently chiming down but the reason I wanted to show you this particular item is you'll note if you can see close enough the menu is in French this is very typical of the early 1900s fine dining was french cuisine and I wanted to show this because we do have quite a bit of foreign language material in the collection and we're always looking for volunteers who know how to translate them for us and we actually just did a blog post this week about the foreign language materials in the collection so if you're interested I urge you to go in and read more about it our next type of document is a manuscript this is from the harvard college library collection um and as you can see it's handwritten and hand edited by t r himself this is an essay from 1916 about military preparedness in world war one and what I find most interesting about the manuscripts most of them are from harvard is you get to see t r's engagement with his writing this is a man who earns quite a bit of his living by being a writer and by seeing what letter what words he would cross out and what he would replace them with you start to understand some of his decision process as a writer and I think that's a great insight into t r himself lastly I want to share with you a document that makes a really important point yes we are the theater rosevelt digital library but I firmly believe that you can understand the story of theater rosevelt without understanding the world in which he lived and he lived during one of the most fascinating periods of united states history and our collections I think reflect that pretty amazingly so far this particular newspaper is from the theater rosevelt inaugural site in buffalo new york and it was saved all these years because its headlines had to do with the mckinley assassination which took place in buffalo but if you get past all the headlines about the assassination you start to find these really neat advertisements there's one over here for tiffani and company this one is for castor oil for children it took me a long time to figure out what it was actually these are hotel advertisements and I think this one is my personal favorite the courier pattern service if you like to this service you could call them up and they would bring the pattern to your house and you could make your women's breakfast jacket um and so I think that these are the materials that give a very rich understanding of the world that tr was living in and moving in and making his decisions in and that makes the digital library a true interesting resource not just for tr but for his own era so I hope that I have enticed you to take some time this afternoon and sit down at a computer and dive in to the digital library go and read more of quentin rosevelt's letters go and read more about tr's books selection advice I trust me it's quite interesting um and go and look at park and the card rooms and and all the visual materials that we have and let us know what you find because the more you tell us what you like and what you need the more we can make this a resource that's useful and interesting to all of you thank you crystal promise that was outstanding and I think you get a sense of a couple just want to make a couple quick notes first of all for those of you who can stay we have some computers spread around the room if you want to play with the site our staff will help you walk through it here are things you need to know you can create your own account and then you can have your own basket with things and so as you're browsing through and think well that's an interesting letter I'd like to look at that later you can put it in your basket or if you find a piece of the timeline you can take things from the site that you're searching and save them for later use and you can create different files if you want one on Alice rosevelt you can create that one if you want one on firearms or teddy bears or the Roswell and Christmas you can create these little spaces these little baskets and store things in them and then print them at your leisure or use them maybe when you get home after you've been thinking about this for a while I think I don't think I need that and you can discard things but you can collect parts of our archive in ways that sort with your own research or curiosity interests and save them forever if you want so it's very easy to set up an account we can help you if that's something you'd like to do the other thing that strikes me in watching crystal's wonderful showcase of just a few things is how much of a difference this is from print culture you know take that letter from quentin to his father it's one thing to see a transcript of that in a biography of rosevelt's later years it's still moving you read the exact same words that are in the letter but when you see them visualized it changes something in kind and not in just in degree if that makes any sense it deepens your understanding of this era it gives you some sort of aesthetic part of the equation that wasn't there in a mere friendship and so all these things allow you to you saw how you can enlarge them we have high resolution documents you can enlarge them find the thing that most interests you hone in on it but it gives you such a rich even sensuous contextualization of things that you are only seeing in print culture in a very typographical or linear form that this is probably going to represent an enormous change in the way people understand as well as in the way that people research and finally let me reiterate something the chair and said that i think is so important we will become without question the world's most important site for rosevelt studies because we're not harvard and we're not the library of congress but we will have all that harvard has in its rosevelt collection plus the library of congress we're not ever going to be the national park service but we'll have what they have to showcase about rosevelt and it will be knitted and unfolded with things from harvard and the library of congress and the mild city montana municipal museum etc and so we are going to become the the portal of choice the website of choice for rosevelt studies and that means that people from all over the world certainly all over the united states are going to be coming to us and the important thing is this is the thing that sharon and i insisted upon when we began working with the burn group they can't get to rosevelt without getting through us they have to see dickinson state university in order to get at rosevelt and they have to see visuals of the badlands of western north dakota to understand or even find a document in a rosevelt studies i think what that's going to mean one of the things we do here is have annual symposia we just had our sixth annual symposium on theodore rosevelt and new thoughts about the american west we do it every year in the autumn this year we hosted the national theodore rosevelt association and these symposiums bring the best scholars in the theodore rosevelt world to the campus of dickinson state university and each year we take them on a field trip out to the elkhorn ranch site 35 miles north of madora and every rosevelt scholar that we've taken that said the same thing i wish i had come here before i wrote my book well we're going to bring people here virtually and visually before they can write anything and we think that when they see the campus of dickinson state university when they see the badlands which were so important to rosevelt's development they will want to come here physically to take a look before they go on with their research and so this is going to have implications for tourism our student body our faculty our staff i'm going to put dickinson state university on the map in a new way nationally and internationally and if we do that if we can accomplish that in addition to providing this important service to the rosevelt world we will be absolutely gratified and satisfied so thank you so much for coming for those who are watching on the worldwide web theodore roseveltcenter.org is your portal we have a few tens of thousands of documents so far it's going to rise exponentially in the next couple of years and if you want to help in any way financially or as a volunteer to help sort documents we would be absolutely thrilled so go to roseveltcenter.org to find out more and thanks everyone and particularly thanks to dr. costin and Sharon kielzer for this launch of our website thank you very much