Pryor Center Announces New Executive Director

The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has named William Schwab as its new executive director.

“We are very excited to have Bill take on this role,” said Todd Shields, dean of Fulbright College. “I know that his leadership will build on the center’s past success, and help it continue to expand its footprint to better serve our community, all while collaborating closely with our faculty and students.”

Shields said Schwab’s new role is part of the Pryor Center’s push to more clearly define job descriptions and duties in order to better focus on and accelerate the center’s public outreach efforts.

Schwab said he is looking forward to the opportunities his new role will present.

“The Pryor Center is a valuable resource for all who desire to connect to Arkansas’ oral and visual history,” Schwab said. “My role is to empower the center’s staff to focus on making these incredible and meaningful collections more widely available, so that they will benefit our entire state and beyond, for generations to come.”

The center’s public outreach efforts accelerated in 2017 when Fulbright College once again became home to the Pryor Center, which holds numerous archives and materials that are invaluable for teaching and research.

Shields said that this realignment will also enable the center’s director of news archives and media, Randy Dixon, to fast-track the KATV archive digitization project that he is leading.

“Prior to joining the Pryor Center in 2013, Randy was formerly the news director of KATV,” Shields said. “He is essential to seeing this project through.”

Thanks to a $1.5 million contribution from Barbara A. Tyson and the Tyson Foods Foundation Inc. in 2017, the KATV Preservation Project was created to catalog, index, digitize and archive the extensive collection of KATV footage donated to the Pryor Center in 2009.

KATV, the ABC affiliate in Little Rock, archived and cataloged its newscasts and news footage for more than 50 years. The collection contains approximately 26,000 hours of video and film, and includes all aspects of Arkansas television coverage, such as major news and weather events, Arkansas sports, politics and features – all needing to be digitized and made easily accessible online.

The center also currently has an online archive of more than 115 video interviews, with transcripts of hundreds more and still more being processed. These are life stories told by Arkansans from every walk of life and level of achievement, including first-person accounts by eyewitnesses to Arkansas history.

In his new role, Schwab will manage the day-to-day operations of the Pryor Center, including strategic planning and budgeting, coordination of fundraising efforts with Fulbright College, supervision of the center’s staff, serving as a main liaison between the center and the college, and continuation of his role to help the center expand upon its mission of education, research and outreach.

He is a University Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology and formerly served as dean of Fulbright College from 2008-2011, associate dean from 1993-1998, and was chair of the department twice, from 1989-1993 and from 1998-2008.

About The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The center was started in 1999 as part of the Department of History in Fulbright College by Jeannie Whayne, professor of history and the center’s first director. The initial concept came from former U.S. Sen. David Pryor and his wife, Barbara, who provided seed money in the form of a $220,000 gift. They didn’t initially plan to have their name on the center, but a $2 million gift from the Tyson Family Foundation in 2005 created an endowment for the re-named David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.

Today, the Pryor Center fills a suite of offices and studios at One East Center Street on the Fayetteville Square. It has a staff of seven full-time and five part-time employees, top-of-the-line digital video studios and editing suites, plus additional equipment that can produce documentary-quality video interviews from anywhere.

For more information and updates, visit the Pryor Center’s website at pryorcenter.uark.edu.