Kent State University has launched a fundraising campaign to create a visitor center to memorialize the shootings and campus unrest of May 4, 1970.

The university has applied for a $75,000 planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is seeking donations to cover the project's estimated cost of $1 million.

The center will be in what used to be the office for the campus newspaper in Taylor Hall, which overlooks the site of the shootings and is close to the 1990 memorial designed by Chicago architect Bruno Ast.

KSU associate provost Laura Davis said interest remains strong in the May 4 shootings more than 38 years after the event.

She points to 22 books about the shootings, 40,000 hits per
year since 2000 on the May 4 collection in the university library and 17 national and 27 statewide articles in 2006 and 2007 about the shootings.

''We feel very strongly about making the history more available in a permanent way. We — the witnesses and people who were around then — won't be here forever,'' said Davis, who as a KSU student was a demonstrator and a witness to the shootings.

The visitor center would not be the university's first acknowledgement of the killing of four students and wounding of nine others by the Ohio National Guard following a weekend of unrest over the Vietnam War.

The university has established the Center for Applied Conflict Management, a May 4 Resource Center in the library, and an annual symposium that examines democratic values. It also cordoned off the spaces in the Prentice Hall parking lot that is where the four who died fell.

Students and shooting victims founded the May 4 Task Force to elevate awareness about the event and to provide tours and speakers.

Yet there has been no single site where visitors can get a full picture of the tumultuous events that catapulted KSU into the national spotlight.

Space for the visitor center in what might be the most appropriate location, Taylor Hall, only became available last year when the journalism and mass media program moved to Franklin Hall.

That seeming delay of decades is OK, Davis said, because, ''We're at the point of the cycle where people start to think about writing history.''

She envisions turning the former Daily Kent Stater office into a permanent historic site with multimedia presentations about the student unrest at KSU and how it fit into the larger story of the Vietnam War.

She also foresees a virtual visitor center in a Web-site format, a brochure and audio program that guide visitors who tour the site, special live programs and training students and other volunteers to serve as docents in the center.

The first step would be to secure the planning grant, using the money to develop fundraising tools, she said.

Eventually, the university could apply for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that could cover some or all of the construction cost.

She hopes to have the visitor center open by October 2010.