Arkansas: “TV Archive Digitized to Look Back”

 t’s 1974 and religious groups have gathered outside The Center movie theater in downtown Little Rock. They are clapping and singing hymns — one woman plays an accordion — in peaceful but spirited protest of the theater’s showing of “The Exorcist.”

We know this because video of the event was shared last week on the Twitter account of the University of Arkansas’ David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. The footage is just 55 seconds from the KATV Collection, which includes more than 26,000 hours of raw news footage on film and videotape that was donated to the center in 2009 by Little Rock television station KATV.

[Clip]

Limited video digitization and posting began in 2012, and full digitization and regular postings began in 2018, according to Randy Dixon, the center’s director of news archives and media.

The center has partnered with Pennsylvania-based The Media Preserve to conserve the footage and convert it to digital.

“We’ve done about 50% of the collection,” says Dixon, who worked at KATV for 31 years.

The earliest report available is from 1933; the most recent is from 1980.