The Easter weekend is upon us and most places in Britain are staring at a pretty bleak weather forecast.\u00c2\u00a0 Snow and sleet for Saturday and Sunday apparently.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve got it wrong plenty of times in the past so hopefully those wintry showers will not materialize.\u00c2\u00a0 All the same, it’s looking like a weekend mostly spent indoors rather than basking in glorious spring sunshine (if you can remember what sunshine is).<\/p>\n
Thankfully, if there’s any risk of boredom, Sports Illustrated have given us a cure.\u00c2\u00a0 They launched the SI Vault<\/a> yesterday, providing free access to their rich archive of fifty-plus years of great sporting coverage.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s rich in the sense that there is a wealth of content to enjoy, but it is also very vaulable from SI’s perspective.\u00c2\u00a0 In previous years, they have been able to earn revenue from\u00c2\u00a0their archive\u00c2\u00a0by selling ‘back-issues’ or publishing collections of old articles, such as the ‘Sports Illustrated: Great Baseball Writing’ book that I reviewed<\/a> earlier this year.\u00c2\u00a0 The internet now allows SI to ‘exploit’ their archive to even greater effect.\u00c2\u00a0 They had two choices: generate revenue by making the viewers pay to access it (either downloading copies of single issues or using a subscription service) or attract millions of visitors by making the archives free and\u00c2\u00a0generating revenue\u00c2\u00a0by selling advertising space.\u00c2\u00a0 Luckily for us, SI chose the latter option.<\/p>\n The SI Vault is in Beta mode at the moment and I’ve already encountered a few bugs.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t seem to get any of the articles to load up: clicking the link just takes me to a random bundle of error messages.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m sure they’ll get\u00c2\u00a0any problems\u00c2\u00a0fixed soon enough though.<\/p>\n You can get around the ‘article error’ for some of the issues of SI by using one of the great features of the SI Vault.\u00c2\u00a0 Simply click on an issue of Sports Illustrated, select “View this Issue” and it loads up the SI Reader, where you can flick through the issue page-by-page.\u00c2\u00a0 The layout is good, initially displaying a two-page spread with buttons at the bottom to allow you to zoom into each page, making the text easy to read.\u00c2\u00a0 It looks like these are scans of paper copies (I may be wrong) and looking at a few different examples, some are clearer than others, but they should all\u00c2\u00a0be legible.<\/p>\n You can step through the issue by clicking on the standard arrows in the Reader, but it’s more fun to put your mouse pointer over the top or bottom left\/right corner of the two-page spread\u00c2\u00a0as this\u00c2\u00a0‘lifts’ the corner up as if you were lifting up the page on a\u00c2\u00a0paper copy.\u00c2\u00a0 Click and it turns the page to the next two-page spread (it looks like you may be able to turn the page simply by ‘lifiting the corner’ and then dragging your mouse pointer as well, although, if so, either the Beta reader isn’t functioning correctly or I can’t quite get the technique right – I’m sure I did it once, but haven’t been able to repeat the trick!).\u00c2\u00a0 Alternatively you can display the thumbnails\u00c2\u00a0and skip to the section of your choice.<\/p>\n It looks like quite a lot of issues\u00c2\u00a0are not\u00c2\u00a0currently available via the SI Reader and with the articles not displaying correctly otherwise, access to the archives is limited right now.\u00c2\u00a0 But we’re less than twenty-four hours from the launch of this exciting new feature, so we can’t be too critical.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n