Theodore Roosevelt Schellenberg (24 February 1903 – 14 January 1970) was an American archivist and archival theorist. Schellenberg's publications and ideas are part of the foundation for archival theory and practice in the United States. In particular, Schellenberg is known for pioneering American archival ideas about appraisal.
Early life
Theodore Roosevelt Schellenberg was born on February 24, 1903, to Abraham Lawrence and Sarah Schroeder Schellenberg in Garden Township, Harvey County, Kansas. Prior to Theodore's birth, his parents had decided to emigrate to the United States in 1879 to avoid the introduction of Russification in their native country, Russia. There was a large immigration population of Mennonites in Kansas during this time, which allowed Abraham Schellenberg to continue working as a leader for the Mennonite Brethren.
Education
In his youth, T. R. Schellenberg attended McPherson Elementary School (1908–1912) and Hillsboro Middle School (1912–1915). He went on to attend Hillsboro High School (1916–1918), but he later finished his high school career at Tabor Academy (1919–1922). From there, Schellenberg briefly attended Tabor College (1924–1926) before transferring to the University of Kansas. Here, he graduated in 1928 with a Bachelor's degree in History and received a Master's degree in History in 1930. After receiving both his Bachelor's and Master's at the University of Kansas, he finished his education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D in 1934. His dissertation topic was "The European Background of the Monroe Doctrine, 1818 to 1923."
Career
Upon completing his doctorate, Schellenberg secured a position with the Joint Committee on Materials for Research as Executive Secretary, part of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. In the following year, he was hired within the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as a Deputy Examiner, part of a group of academics who were tasked with examining the records of executive agencies in Washington D.C. In 1938, he was appointed chief of the Division of Agriculture Department Archives, which he eventually left in 1945. It was in this position that he published his first paper in 1939, European Archival Practices in Arranging Records, which laid the groundwork for his life's work. In it, he observed that European methods only applied to U.S. records management in a limited way. Americans were creating documents at an unprecedented rate, and European archival practices did not adequately respond to the changing needs of American records management. Experiencing this issue firsthand during his work at NARA, Schellenberg's theory of the archives came from the practical need to adapt European archival practices to working with the massive scale of the federal records climate.
Schellenberg briefly left NARA for three years at the close of WWII in 1945, when he took a job as a Records Officer in the Office of Price Administration. His work there illustrated the many difficulties found in managing vast amounts of government records, which only increased his commitment to finding solutions. In 1948, he returned to NARA as Program Adviser to the Archivist and published his first major work in 1949 called Disposition of Federal Records: How to Develop an Effective Program for the Preservation and Disposal of Federal Records.
Schellenberg was promoted to Director of Archival Management in 1950 and served in that capacity until 1962. One of his first projects was to craft a rigorous training program for NARA employees because there was an inadequate standardization in his division's policies and procedures. He also created guidelines for how positions would be categorized and ensured that job descriptions were consistent. Schellenberg continued to provide archival training throughout his tenure at NARA by planning a two-semester course at American University, organizing a series of symposiums for senior archivists, and traveling to records centers throughout the U.S. to provide three-day classes on archives management. Schellenberg also oversaw a massive reappraisal of documents to deaccession old records and enforced a methodology more selective in the appraisal of new records. He then went on to serve as the assistant archivist of the United States until he retired in 1963.