Preserving 70 years’ worth of sports broadcasts
The Media School welcomed 93-year-old Indiana native John Miley at Franklin Hall on Sept. 16 to celebrate the launch of its newest archive — the Miley Collection.
Miley has donated his life’s work — a collection of over 44,000 sports broadcasts spanning back to the 1930s — to the National Sports Journalism Center of The Media School at IU.
Friends and family of Miley gathered in the Franklin Hall commons last week for the ceremony. Director of the National Sports Journalism Center and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Galen Clavio began the event with a welcoming speech and a video message from American sportscaster Bob Costas, a close friend of Miley’s.
Miley expressed gratitude for the people who helped him along the way.
“You just never know what’s going to happen in this life,” Miley said during a short speech followed by a Q&A segment during the ceremony. “The thing that you need to do, if you can, is think about the number of people that have helped you, and go home, praise the Lord, and talk to that person or persons.”
Media School Archivist Josh Bennett is in the process of digitizing all 44,000 broadcasts in the collection, which could take up to a decade. He is receiving help from IU’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, a digitization project that lives on through Audio-Visual Preservation Services at IU Libraries.
Bennett expressed his passion for archiving materials and making them accessible to others. He sees many opportunities for students, faculty, scholars, and even sports fans within the Miley Collection.
“A lot of these games don’t exist anywhere else. So, this is it,” Bennett said. “Miley did such an amazing job of 70 years recording and preserving this stuff, and I’m very excited to please him with preserving these materials.”
Bennett has not been the only one working on digitizing the Miley Collection. Media School doctoral student Kristin Wells has also been involved with the project. While Bennett organizes and uploads the materials into the online system, Wells oversees the matching of files to Miley’s personal database and builds off that.
Wells was approached by Clavio last March with the news of Miley’s donation being discussed. She was a teaching assistant for Clavio in the past, and he invited her to work on the digitization of the archive once The Media School received it.
“I was so pumped. I think my jaw visibly dropped because it really is the perfect marriage of things I’m interested in,” Wells said. “To be able to work on a project like this is just amazing.”
Wells has been listening to broadcasts from the collection that have already been digitized before she dives into the physical materials of the audio and video formats, such as CDs and VHS tapes. Trying to match the recordings to Miley’s database requires detective work, which is tedious but very rewarding.
Wells vividly remembers listening to a broadcast from 1947 from the first integrated World Series when the famous Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a researcher of sports activism, moments like those are amazing to hear in person, she said.
Wells has a lot of admiration for Miley’s efforts to collect these broadcasts.
“Being able to have this collection here at The Media School is great because the breadth of this collection spans well beyond Indiana, but it is an Indiana native who has done this and collected it,” she said. “He started recording these games in high school in Indiana, and I think that matters a lot.”
Like Bennett, Wells believes there are many opportunities to use this collection for Media School students.
Bennett hopes that the collection will have its own website where people can search for certain athletes and track all the different teams and games they have been involved with throughout their careers. The process has been very exciting for him.
“From the beginning to the end, I love every part of it. I have one of those jobs that I actually set an alarm sometimes to go home,” Bennett said.
The Miley Collection will also be made available to the public with the usage of a guest account login. Whether for a project, research, or a personal interest, the materials in the archive can provide a great insight into the history of sports broadcasting.
Wells intends to use the archive for her own research in the future. She feels lucky to be involved with the project and expressed the importance of networking so that people know who to go to when opportunities like this arise.
“There are a lot of people who work in The Media School that we as students don’t often directly interface with. There are a lot of people that make this school run, that are doing really awesome things to support learning and research, and so it just starts from talking to people and building those relationships,” Wells said.
Those interested in supporting the digitization of the Miley Collection can donate to the John Miley Media School Collection Fund.
The ceremony with Miley is available to watch on the archived Facebook livestream.