Archive - Collections & Research

Most of Appalshop’s films and June Appal recordings can be purchased from Appalshop Marketing and Sales. Call 1-800-545-7467 or write appalshopsales@appalshop.org for more information.

The Appalshop Archive is in the midst of processing and cataloging the archival collections. In the interim there will be limited access to the collections, but the archivists will make every effort to accommodate requests for stock footage. Only preserved materials will be available for reuse.

For more information please about the Appalshop Archive contact Caroline Rubens at 606-633-0108 or e-mail us at archive@appalshop.org.

Six major collections form the core of the Appalshop Archive. They volume include over 1,800,000 feet of 16mm, super 8 and 8mm film, 4,000 hours of video (1/2" open reel, 3/4" Umatic, Beta, Hi8, MiniDV and DVCAM), 2,000 hours of audio on reel to reel tapes (1/4" and 1/2"), 500 hours of audio on DAT, over 2,000 audiocassettes, and approximately 4,000 photographic negatives.

The Appalachian Film Workshop/Appalshop Films Collection consists of 16mm color and black-and-white footage shot between 1969 and the present, covering all aspects of life in Central Appalachia, including coal mining, subsistence farming, craftspeople, labor strikes, musicians, storytellers, religious practices, out-migration, politics, environmental activism, and Appalachian literature. The collection contains significant footage of historically and culturally important personages and key regional scholars, and a wealth of extensive oral histories of ordinary people.

The Headwaters Television/Appalshop Video Collectionconsists of 1/2" black and white open reel, 3/4" Umatic and BetacamSP color videotapes shot from 1969 to the present. Appalshop's Headwaters Television series shoots large quantities of videotape (25 feet to every foot of finished project) both because videotape is relatively inexpensive and because of the intrinsic archival value of much of the material. The Headwaters Collection covers three major categories: documentation of community groups involved in the efforts for social change (including such issues as toxic waste, strip mining, economic development, and education); documentation of persons undocumented elsewhere whose lives are of regional significance; and documentation of ordinary people who articulate what life in the region was like in the earlier days.

The June Appal Recordings Collection includes the master tapes of over 70 releases of traditional and contemporary mountain music from 1973 to the present, as well as archival audiotapes of over a hundred regional artists. Artists in the Collection include many of national prominence, such as folk singer Jean Ritchie and author James Still, and a number of winners of the National Heritage Award, such as Wade & Julia Mainer and Hazel Dickens.

TheWMMT-FM Collection documents the work of Appalachia's only community-based public radio station, including approximately 15 years of interviews, tapes of news events, public forums, musical performances, and "air checks" of programming created by over two hundred community volunteers since 1985. Also included are tapes of award-winning nationally distributed productions on traditional music, regional economic and social issues, and women writers of Appalachia.

The Pictureman Mullins Collection consists of 3,600 cellulose acetate safety negatives. The photographer, William R. Mullins, ran a studio in Letcher County, Kentucky, between 1935 and 1955, and documented hundreds of people, in portraits and in such activities as baptisms, funerals, and holidays. Appalshop acquired the negatives from Mullins' granddaughter. They have been numbered, sleeved, stored in archivally sound boxes, duplicated, and contact printed.

The Appalachian Media Institute Collectionis the youth video work produced since 1989 by high school students in the region who learn media skills and produce documentaries about their communities. The program was recognized in 1999 with the Coming Up Taller Award from the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

Smaller Collections include Mountain Community Television, consisting of fifty 1/2" reel-to-reel video tapes from a cable-access facility in Norton, Virginia, including cultural and public-issue pieces; Cratis Williams, consisting of video footage donated by Kentucky independent media maker Fred Johnson from his production tapes from the half-hour documentary on Williams, a noted Appalachian scholar and seminal figure in the development of Appalachian Studies; and Harry and Ann Caudill, consisting of 16mm film prints and audiotapes relating to 1960s strip mining and poverty, as well as interviews and stories told by the Appalachian author whose book Night Comes to the Cumberlands: Biography of a Depressed Area is credited with bringing the region to national attention in the early 1960s. Roadside Theater currently maintains its own archive of materials related to Roadside productions.