Sports Illustrated Releases Huge Free Online Archive

I know that this weekend is going to be all about the basketball. But I worry about you come Monday. What happens when you have to wait a few days for your college hoops? So in the spirit of public service I'm telling you about this new resource from Sports Illustrated. There's enough hoops (and football, and baseball, and hockey, and....) to keep you occupied for at least a week.

Sports Illustrated's new offering is called SI Vault, and it's available at http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/ . This new archive of Sports Illustrated materials includes 150,000 stories, 2,800 covers, and 500,000 photographs.

The front page of the archive covers NCAA tournaments, all right -- only it's the tournaments of Christian Laettner and Michael Jordan. Links lead to stories, covers, and entire issues. The top of the page has a keyword search if you're looking for something specific. (There's an advanced search but it doesn't offer much additional functionality; fortunately the search result pages allow you to narrow your results by decade or search through a specific date range.)

A search for acc tournament found 438 articles. And 15 photos, 4 photo galleries, 139 video clips (brought to you by third-party Truveo) and 2 covers. The articles are as old as 1958 and as recent and 2004. (I think SI is still adding content to the vault, so this may change over time.) The full content of articles is included, with only a little bit of distracted provided by the hyperlinking within the articles. (Names are hyperlinked to articles, search results to teams, etc.)

The whole archive is free, and with 150,000 articles you should be kept busy when there's no hoops on TV. Good luck to your team in the NCAA tournament! GO ACC!