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Barbara Tyson, Foundation Give $1.5M to Pryor Center

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The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History said this week that it has received $1.5 million from Barbara A. Tyson and the Tyson Foods Foundation Inc.

The center, which is part of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, said the money will be used to “catalog, index, digitize and archive” the collection of video footage donated by Little Rock ABC affiliate KATV-TV, Channel 7, in 2009.

The center said the KATV collection is one of the largest local television news archives in the country, containing more than 50 years of footage, or about 26,000 hours of video and film.

“These are our shared stories and memories,” former U.S. Sen. David H. Pryor said in a news release. “There’s a wealth of history in this footage, and in serving as a United States senator for many years, I came to deeply appreciate the rich experiences of our Arkansan citizens. Preserving these tapes is preserving our state’s history, and we are grateful for Barbara and Tyson’s commitment to doing so.”

The money will support efforts to digitization the footage, add metadata, buy equipment, storage original and digitized media and hire staff. The KATV collection is currently stored at the Arkansas State Library in Little Rock.

“Digitizing the KATV collection has been a priority of ours for years,” said Randy Dixon, director of the Pryor Center. “Many of the videotapes are fragile and the collection has been deteriorating with each passing year, so we felt a sense of urgency to complete this project as quickly as possible. Thanks to this gift, we’ll be able to move forward with preserving these important parts of our state’s history.”

The Pryor Center was created in 1999. The initial concept came from Pryor and his wife, Barbara, who provided $220,000 in seed money. A $2 million gift from the Tyson Family Foundation in 2005 created an endowment for the center.

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