photo by: AP File Photo

FILE - Republican presidential candidate Sen. Robert Dole R-Kan., gestures while making a speech in Washington, March 28, 1988.

In the Dole Institute of Politics’ collections are thousands of films and tapes from throughout Sen. Bob Dole’s career – records that, for all we know, might only have a couple of plays left in them.

They’re in all kinds of formats, said senior archivist Sarah Gard – from cassette tapes to 1-inch and 2-inch film, from VHS to professional standards like Betacam. And they’re from all throughout Dole’s decades-long career, from his first congressional campaign in 1960 to his presidential runs in 1988 and 1996, the latter as the Republican nominee.

And now, with $5.2 million in new federal funding, the institute will be able to make the most of those materials’ good plays. They’ll be digitized, so that scholars and the public can safely see what’s on them and refer back to them for generations to come.

“We need to send this off to be digitized, and then we can watch the digital file and see what’s on it, not play these items to find out if it’s usable and then send it off to be digitized,” Gard said of the basic problem. “Because what if it only has one or two good plays left in it? You want to be able to capture the content first.”

The funding for the digitization effort was secured in Congress’ 2026 appropriations package by Republican Sen. Jerry Moran, and it will help the institute digitize roughly 5,400 items, according to a news release from the University of Kansas. Audrey Coleman, the institute’s director, said in the release that it’s “the largest singular investment made in the Dole Institute since its founding era.” (The institute opened in 2003.)

“It speaks to the enduring importance of Bob Dole’s history and legacy in Kansas, our nation and around the world,” Coleman said in the release.

The Dole Institute has the equipment to digitize printed materials and photos, and it’s made collections of them available in electronic form. But making digital copies of audio and moving pictures from decades ago is much harder than making a copy of a photograph, Gard said.

“With a paper or a photograph, we can pull that out easily and read it and look at it,” she said. “We have the equipment here to scan it and share it with people. But these recorded sound and moving image items, they’re much more specialized formats and equipment to play them is becoming scarce. We don’t have the equipment here on site.”

It’s expensive to send the files to places that have that equipment and the specialized knowledge to use it, which is why it hasn’t been possible before, Gard said. And the fragility of the materials means it’s important to do it right the first time.

“Paper has a very long preservation life” Gard said. “But film and video and cassettes, they’re pretty new formats in the scheme of history, and some of them don’t have a shelf life of hundreds of years. … You want to be able to play these items one time, while it’s being digitized, in order to preserve as many quality plays per item left.”

It will take multiple years to digitize the records, Gard said. But once the process is complete, the institute will have a much better idea of what is on them. Currently, she said, the items are labeled only minimally, and we won’t really know the details until the digital versions are available.

Gard did give a general idea of what kinds of things are in the collection. Some of them are likely Dole’s interviews with media outlets, ranging from national media to radio stations here in Kansas. Others are labeled as campaign footage from 1960, Dole’s first campaign for U.S. House; 1968, his first Senate race; and master footage from his presidential runs. There’s even what seems to be a shoot of some kind in the tiny rural Kansas town of Russell where Dole was born.

“Some of (the footage) is kind of well-known – like, it would be national campaign spots – but then you always record so much more footage than ends up being used,” Gard said.

There’s also a collection of cassettes of interviews that Dole did as a senator in the late ’70s and early ’80s, labeled with events going on at that time or issues Congress was working on. “It’ll be interesting to hear what he was saying,” Gard said.

In addition to the digitization project, the federal money will fund improvements to the “technology and physical infrastructure that helps us with the ongoing care for these historical materials,” Gard said. And the digitized files won’t just be for scholars. Gard said they’ll be made available to the public through the Dole Institute’s website.

“That’ll also be a process that takes time, but we’re excited for that,” she said.

The news release said select files will also be contributed to the American Congress Digital Archives Portal, an online records project that the institute collaborates on with West Virginia University Libraries and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education.

It won’t happen overnight, but Gard is sure the digitized archive will be a valuable resource for all sorts of people interested in Dole’s life and work.

“Students, teachers, researchers, Kansans, people all over the country hopefully will have access to the Dole archive in an ongoing capacity for many years and generations to come,” Gard said.