CARS has from its beginnings spearheaded or supported a wide variety of media projects.  Two were works of art dedicated to the development of tangible campus memorials of significant figures in the University’s history:  A portrait by UA art professor John Newman of Reconstruction-era UA founder Joseph Carter Corbin, mounted by the entrance to Old Main’s Giffels Auditorium, and a statue honoring distinguished scholar and English professor Ben Kimpel, situated by the southwest corner entrance to the classroom building bearing his name.

Other CARS-initiated media projects have aimed at wider distribution throughout the state.   Three documentary videos were distributed free of charge to public school educators and repeatedly broadcast on AETN (two of these are catalogued in the collection of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress).  The first was Beautiful Thing: The Rugs of Jean Will, produced in 1984, followed by Walking On: Journey of an Ozark Life, a portrait of Newton County maple syrup maker and ginseng digger Walter Williams (1993) and Music’s Easier: Frankie Kelly, Arkansas Fiddler and Stonemason (1997). These films and more can be viewed at the Digital Drive-in Theater.

CARS has also produced two music reissue projects.  The first was Somewhere in Arkansas: Early Commercial Country Music Recordings From Arkansas, 1928-1932, edited and transcribed by W.K. McNeil, a 3-CD collection issued in 1997 and made available without cost to public school and university teachers and libraries throughout the state.  This was followed in 2003 by the 2-CD set, Anthology of Arkansas Folksongs, a fifty-seven song selection from the Mary Celestia Parler Collection of Arkansas traditional music in the Special Collections Division of the UA library, edited by Alan Spurgeon and Rachel Reynolds and also made available at no charge to Arkansas school teachers and libraries.  Just over a decade later, the library successfully made the entire Parler collection available online—see Ozark Folksong Collection.

In print media, CARS is collaborating with The Pryor Center and the University of Arkansas Press to produce The Arkansas Character series. The collection thus far has four titles: True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley by Kelly Mulhollan, An Arkansas Florilegium by Kent Bonar and Edwin Smith, Remote Access: Small Libraries in Arkansas by Sabine Schmidt and Don House, and Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill by Robert Cochran and Dale Carpenter, including selected videos. More details can be found on the Publications page.