Evansville native John Miley, 93, is a big sports fan.
When he was in high school, he started recording sports broadcasts on the radio.
Eight decades later, Miley has amassed more than 44,000 sports broadcasts, including every Super Bowl, a half-century of the Kentucky Derby and Indianapolis 500 races, and every World Series since 1954.
He’s donating his collection to the Indiana University Bloomington Media School, where it will be fully digitized and made publicly available through the National Sports Journalism Center.
Watch the documentary: Archiving Airwaves: The Miley Collection
Galen Clavio, director of the National Sports Journalism Center at IU Bloomington, spoke at Monday’s celebration of the donation.
“We have over 300 students in our sports media program,” he said. “Many of them are very interested in sports broadcasting, specifically, this will be utilized in the classes that we use to teach them how to do that.”
The Media School already has filed about 130 shows from the archive.
Even with the collection’s organization, Clavio estimated it will take about a decade to catalog the whole thing.
“Some of the collection was digitized already, probably about 10, 15 percent. Even that, though, requires us to redo all of the metadata, redo all of the tagging, catalog it in our library system for the archive and then make it available,” he said.
“My [cataloging] system is outdated,” Miley added during the celebration, “but it's wonderful, and [Clavio] is making it better.”
The IU Media School will also host a listening room where people can visit a re-creation of Miley’s office and view the collection. The archive will also be available online.
