HANK KAPLAN ARCHIVES

[enrique]

The rags to riches story behind Brooklyn College's Hank Kaplan Boxing Archive just got a little richer: on April 16, 2010 the collection's chief archivist, Professor Anthony Cucchiara, became the winner of a $315,000 endowment from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to organize the largest and most extensive boxing collection in the world. "This two-year grant will allow us to process and preserve this invaluable collection that spans two centuries of boxing history," says Prof. Cucchiara.

Finding the funds to organize, catalog, and digitize the 2,600 books, 500,000 photographs and negatives, 1,200 posters, reams of clipping files, scrapbooks, documents, letters, and memorabilia that make up the Kaplan collection was a daunting task. A $50,000 seed grant from Barry Feirstein, Chair of the Brooklyn College Foundation, allowed Prof. Cucchiara and his team, Assistant Archivist Marianne LaBatto and Conservator Slava Polischuk, to begin an inventory of the over 2,000 cartons of material. But the goal was to make the entire collection available to the public, in accordance with the donor's wishes.

[Broncano]

Are they taking volunteers?

[granberry]

Too bad a more valuable collection---the rare fight films Jimmy Jacobs collected over a lifetime---was put in the hands of ESPN—a commercial enterprise that sells Ali and Leonard and doesn’t have a clue who Joe Gans and Sam Langford are.

A pity a NEH didn’t give money to archive Jacobs' collection and make it available.

I fear his incredible life’s work will be lost as a result.