Pryor Center to Relocate KATV Videotape Collection to Arkansas State Library

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The KATV Collection, which consists of 24,000 hours of video containing materials recorded back to 1950, will be moved to the Arkansas State Library Saturday, Aug. 28, and Sunday, Aug. 29. The collection, donated to the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas last year, will be stored in a new, climate-controlled archive until all the tapes can be digitized by the Pryor Center.

“The sheer scale of this irreplaceable, one of a kind archive of Arkansas visual history, 24,000 hours of videotape, is unprecedented in our state,” said Kris Katrosh, director of the Pryor Center. “Our deep appreciation goes to the visionary leadership at KATV, Channel 7, and Allbritton Communications for creating and maintaining this videotape collection for decades. They saw the need early on to make sure these Arkansas memories were properly archived. The Pryor Center is honored to take over the responsibility for the collection’s long-term preservation, and for sharing this history with all Arkansans.”

Moving the collection of videotapes to an archival-quality facility is a critical first step toward ensuring that these recordings of Arkansas history, most of which have never been publicly available, are properly preserved, digitized and shared with the state’s citizens. The Arkansas State Library is providing, free of charge, optimal storage conditions of these videotapes, allowing the Pryor Center the time necessary to properly assess the material and digitize the videotapes so that this anthology of Arkansas history can be made readily available to educators, students, researchers and the public.

A decade ago, when David and Barbara Pryor learned that another local news affiliate had discarded its entire catalog of aging archival tapes in the city dump, they embarked on a campaign quite different from their usual political one. Their goal: to insure the preservation of KATV Channel 7’s more than 24,000 hours of videotape containing film and video footage of Arkansas history, the most comprehensive archive of its type in the state, and one of the largest in the nation. To put the size of this collection into context, it would require almost three years of viewing around the clock simply to watch the entire KATV collection.

The KATV videotape collection was gifted to the University of Arkansas in May 2009, and a special ceremony to celebrate the donation was held July 8, 2009, in Washington, D.C., in the United States Senate Caucus Room.