Sunday, February 12, 2012

Research tools

Here are various sources I have found helpful in researching sports TV history and in constructing historical TV schedules and announcer assignments:

Online newspaper/magazine archives
  • Historical newspaper digital archives such as Proquest, Newsbank, and Factiva. Many public and school libraries offer online access to one or more of these databases. Check with your library for the appropriate URLs and logon details.
  • Google News Archive has a collection of archived newspapers, some of which are free. It also provides subsets of the "paid" content in the free search results.
  • The SI Vault is a fascinating collection from the archives of Sports Illustrated, but the magazine has has a relatively small amount of coverage in the area of broadcasting.

Original game footage
  • Youtube contains a large volume of original game clips. While the majority of the content is quite recent, the site does have a sizable amount of footage from the 1990s and 1980s, a fair amount from the 1970s, and some from earlier years.
  • ESPN Classic replays a number of original game telecasts (mostly college football and basketball from ABC or the ESPN networks.). Regional sports networks such as MASN, conference networks such as BTN, and league owned networks such as MLBN, NFLN, NBATV, also rebroadcast older games.
  • TV4U has a relatively small inventory, but some truly classic material including a 1956 college basketball game called by a then 27-year old Keith Jackson.

Miscellaneous
  • Regular Google searching can provide useful information. For example, some sports DVD/tape trading sites list announcers.
  • Many official college web sites contain archived game notes with TV/radio announcer information. 





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