Oregon State Archives News

Oregon State Archivist Roy Turnbaugh to Retire

State Archivist Roy Turnbaugh is set to retire after more than twenty years of service.

Roy Turnbaugh, Oregon State Archivist for more than twenty years, has announced his retirement.

Dr. Turnbaugh became Oregon’s third State Archivist in January of 1985, coming from the Illinois State Archives where he served as the Head of Information Services. Always an active presence in the profession, Dr. Turnbaugh has written numerous articles for publication in the American Archivist and other professional journals and books. He has been awarded the C.F.W. Coker Prize by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in 1984 for his work on the Guide to Illinois County Records and that same year was a Mellon Fellow at the University of Michigan. He was also awarded the SAA Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award by the Society of American Archivists in 1999 for an article that he wrote entitled “Information Technology, Records, and State Archives.”

Dr. Turnbaugh’s professional activities have included memberships in the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA) in which he served as president from 1998-2000, Society of American Archivists and Northwest Archivists. In 2000, he was appointed as NAGARA’s representative to the board of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the profession’s primary grant funding agency and served in that capacity until 2004.

Serving as Oregon’s State Archivist for more than one-third of its 60 year existence, Dr. Turnbaugh’s leadership and dedication to the program paved the way for accomplishing a number of milestones, a few of which follow:

He moved the program from a 1930’s hops warehouse to a state of the art building in 1991; saw the placement of the Archives web site onto the internet in January1994, becoming the first public archives on the World Wide Web; has a current website that has grown to over 70,000 pages and has been awarded a “top 100 site” by a major genealogical publication; developed a pro-active records management program scheduling thousands of state and local government records and developing standards and policies for microfilm, imaging and electronic records; and has a first rate publications program, responsible for publishing Oregon’s Administrative Rules and the Oregon Blue Book. Most importantly and with his leadership, put together a dedicated staff that he nurtured and encouraged to make the Oregon State Archives a model archives and records management program.

Dr. Turnbaugh will be missed by those he has served so well over the past twenty years. He plans on relocating with his wife, Donna, and their dogs to North Carolina.