Not long after Pryor retired from the Senate in 1996, an 18-wheeler rolled into the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. On it were some 1,100 boxes of papers--loaded and shrink-wrapped on wooden pallets--bound for the special collections division of the university library.

In the boxes were campaign materials, videos of Senate proceedings and committee hearings, thousands of letters processed by congressional staffers, even thousands of telephone message slips taken straight from secretaries' desks--all the remains of Pryor's 18-year career in the U.S. Senate.

Together, the boxes hold about as much as 140 four-drawer filing cabinets. Even after more than a year and a half of work, at least two-thirds of the materials remain unsorted. Library personnel and graduate students have been working on an inventory of the boxes, trying to make sense of the contents for future researchers.

"It's a tremendous, job but you've got to understand that for people in public life who have staff, like senators and the president, generally their material is in pretty decent shape and arranged in a recognizable order," says Michael J. Dabrishus, who heads the special collections division. "This isn't as if the files in someone's cabinet were just dumped into boxes."

Many of the boxes are either unmarked or labeled only with vague descriptions such as "letters."

"I can't imagine what all's in it," Pryor says of the collection of papers he sent to the university. "I would hate to go through it myself."

In addition to thousands of press releases and official photographs, as well as hundreds of video cassettes, the boxes record much of Pryor's correspondence with constituents, even many of the cards Pryor received from well-wishers after suffering a heart attack in 1991.

Pryor says he tried to save everything. But he recalls colleagues who threw away--even burned--the bulk of their records, a policy he compares to the Taliban's destruction of ancient Afghan statues.