* The Sports Illustrated "Vault": An early appraisal

March 22, 2008

Sports Illustrated launched its new digital archive earlier this week. After a quick glance, and realizing it’s still in beta, I have mixed feelings.

Bear in mind I’m only talking about the baseball here, but I’m assuming the same applies for everything else.

As of today, there are 14,985 articles, 3,750 pictures, 69 “galleries” (photo essays). 497 pieces of video, and 545 covers. This, of course, will change over time.

On the one hand, having access to every (?) article that appeared in the 50-plus years of the magazine is a true treasure, for causal fans and researchers alike. The pieces are well categorized and the search engine allows the browser to focus on a specific sport, decade, or more specific time period. You can also search for articles that include your favorite team (like most search engines, this means anything that contains the name, regardless of how causally or deep the reference), and by the last name of active players. I can’t say I understand that philosophy, since you can ust plug in the name in the search box and go; I guess they thought it would narrow down the field a bit.

A search for Sandy Koufax generated 767 articles, but only three pictures. That can’t be right; there has to be more in the annals of SI wouldn’t you think? Perhaps there are still some rights issues to be worked out.

Perhaps that also why the articles are presented in a straight format, similar to TIME (it’s parent company). That is, this is not a straight recreation of the original page, as publications like U.S. News and World Report and many others offer. For most purposes, this is fine. Unfortunately for me, I was working on a lengthy project about baseball and popular culture in Sports Illustrated which included others aspects of the eras, such as advertisements, styles, the way language has changed over the years IThe Sporting news, which has been around a lot longer, actually use to refer to African American athletes as “dusky-hued” and “ebony.”) Perhaps, once these other issues are hammered out, the format will change as well.

Another thing I hope the techies address: The navigation is a bit clunky. I could have done another player search after Koufax search, but in order to change to looking up a team I had to go back to the MLB frontpage and start all over for a team search. Picking the K.C. Royals, I found 765 articles, but they were listed in reverse chronological order (you can’t start with the earliest citation) and only returned five articles at a time (which can’t be changed either). Trying to find something from the mid 1970s would have necessitated plugging in the dates One can also pick by relevance, which would put the features at the top of the list and skip the mere mentions. But they have to do something to make it a bit more researcher-friendly.

Given the newness, and hoping that they’ll work on the bugs (some articles have extraneous text and strange formatting), I’ll reserve any sort of “grade.” For the time being, have fun exploring. It’s still a welcome addition to the sports readers world.

visitor stats

0Shares

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post:

script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-5496371-4']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();