More than 50 years of news and sports broadcasts have been boxed up and donated to the University of Oregon. The gift from Chambers Communications is valued at more than $1-million.
Chambers Communications owns a number of ABC affiliate stations in Oregon, including KEZI-9 News which has been on the air since 1960. All of those nightly newscasts, along with hundreds of hours of UO sports programming, means Chambers has a lot of video tapes. But not anymore. Now the UO has all of those tapes, 450 cardboard boxes full of them. That adds up to more than 5,000 hours of footage spanning 5 decades. UO Spokeswoman Julie Brown says the tapes include Oregonians ranging from Steve Prefontaine to Mark Hatfield.
Brown: "As we think about broadcast news stories and before we had the ability to tape those and be able to record them, they typically aired once and then were not seen again. So there are hidden gems in this footage."
It will take a while for the UO Library to digitize and catalog the entire collection. The goal is to have it accessible to the public.