Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History Receives $35,000 in State Funds

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Check presentation l-r, Archie Shaffer, advisory board member; Barbara Pryor; state Rep. David Whitaker; former Sen. David Pryor; Randy Dixon, center director

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Three Arkansas state legislators have provided a total of $35,000 from the state General Improvement Fund to the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas.

The General Improvement Fund sets aside various amounts of money to state legislators and the governor for special projects that can be funded from the state government's budget surplus.

This year District 85 State Rep. David Whitaker appropriated $20,000 for the Pryor Center to buy equipment for one of six new digital video-editing stations. Rep. Darrin Williams of District 36 appropriated $10,000 to help pay to digitize and store 200 hours of footage donated to the center by KATV. Rep. Charlie Collins of District 84 appropriated $5,000 for the center to purchase new field equipment to use in collecting oral and visual history interviews with Arkansans around the state.

“This support from our state legislators is very important to the future of the Pryor Center,” said Randy Dixon, director of the center. “Our goal here is to ‘collect, preserve and connect’ – collect and preserve the oral and visual history of our state, and connect this valuable resource to this and future generations. We can’t achieve this goal without strong financial support, public and private.”

The Pryor Center is in the midst of a move into new offices on the ground floor of One Center Street on the Fayetteville Square. The facility is intended to be highly visible and open to the public, while providing a base of operations to record and archive oral histories from people all over the state. The new offices should be open by the end of this year.

The center is also in the process of cataloging, indexing, digitizing and archiving the 26,000 video tapes in the KATV collection, and making this historical treasure available on the center’s website. Other major projects include interviews of campaign staff for then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s first run for president, recordings of members of the Arkansas Extension Homemakers Council commemorating the organization’s 100^th anniversary, and talks with reporters from both the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette about their newspapers.