FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville announced the release of a series of 28 interviews documenting President Bill Clinton’s early years in Hope and Hot Springs.

The Pryor Center has the mission of documenting Arkansas history and has sought out and interviewed a wide variety of people who knew Clinton before he left Arkansas for college. The interviews will be available on the University Libraries Web site for use by students, teachers and the general public.

The Pryor Center, along with the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, has been commissioned by the Clinton Center to conduct in-depth interviews to document the entirety of Clinton’s life. The Pryor Center is responsible for documenting five phases of Clinton’s life: the Hope-Hot Springs years; the Georgetown-Oxford-Yale years; the post-college years when Clinton was teaching at the University of Arkansas School of Law and serving as Arkansas Attorney General, 1973-1978; the gubernatorial years, 1979-1981, 1983-1992; and the post-presidential years. The Miller Center is responsible for conducting interviews focusing on the White House years - as they have done for every outgoing administration since that of President Carter.

The Pryor Center has interviewed 40 individuals in the Hope-Hot Springs phase, with 17 from the Hope years and 23 from Hot Springs. A number of the interviews from this first stage are still undergoing review by the persons interviewed, and they will be released soon.

Over the course of the project, the Pryor Center plans to conduct about 300 interviews. The tapes and transcripts will be deposited in the Special Collections Department of the UA Libraries, with copies going to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock and the Miller Center in Virginia.

All of the Clinton Project interviews are posted on the UA Libraries Web site at http://libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/pryorcenter/default.asp.

The Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral & Visual History is a part of the Special Collections Department at the University of Arkansas Libraries. Mr. Kris Katrosh is the newly hired director of the Pryor Center. The center was recently endowed by a generous gift from the Tyson family of Springdale.

Interviews posted as of January 30, 2007:

Phase I: The Hope and Hot Springs Years