LA84 Foundation Announces Digital Recreation of "The Sporting Life"

The LA84 Foundation today announced the Web-publication of "The Sporting Life," an early American sports weekly that emphasized baseball coverage. Eleven years of the newspaper currently are on the Foundation's website - www.LA84Foundation.org - with all years from 1883 to 1917 to be available later this summer.

"'The Sporting Life' was a leading sports publication of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century centuries," said Wayne Wilson, the foundation's vice president, education services. "The digital archive will be a valuable resource for sport historians."

The online publication of "The Sporting Life" is the culmination of a three-way partnership between the LA84 Foundation, the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum and the Society for American Baseball Research. The Hall of Fame Library generously donated its paper copy editions of "The Sporting Life" for scanning. SABR contributed $10,000 to the LA84 Foundation to offset digital production costs. Annapolis Technologies, of Baltimore, Md., served as the digital conversion vendor on the project.

The digital collection of "The Sporting Life" is available at no cost to Internet users. Articles in the collection are full-text searchable. "The Sporting Life" becomes part of a larger digital sports archive on the LA84 Foundation website that includes more than 70,000 PDFs on the history of American and international sport.

About LA84 Foundation: The LA84 Foundation (formerly the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles) was established to manage Southern California's share of the surplus from the highly successful 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The Foundation received $93 million at its inception and, since then, has invested $171 million in sports programs serving more than two million youth in the eight Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Imperial, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Ventura. Its headquarters is located in the historic Britt House near downtown Los Angeles where it houses the world's premier sports library and meeting facilities. The Foundation convenes numerous forums for the exploration of the most pressing issues in sport. For additional information, please visit www.LA84Foundation.org