Beyond the Ring: Arranging and Describing the Hank Kaplan Boxing Archive, 1812-2007.

FAIN: PW-50556-10

CUNY Research Foundation, Brooklyn College (Brooklyn, NY 11210-2850)
Anthony Cucchiara (Project Director: July 2009 to July 2012)

The arrangement, description, and rehousing of the Hank Kaplan collection, consisting of books, photographs, newspaper clippings, and audio and video tapes, as well as scrapbooks, correspondence, and other materials documenting the history of American and British prizefighting.

The Hank Kaplan Boxing Archive was bequeathed to the Brooklyn College Library's Archives and Special Collections Department on December 14, 2007 by its creator and collector, Hank Kaplan, just days before his death. This collection is unarguably the largest boxing archive in the United States. In Kaplan's lifetime, researchers would frequently mine the collection; in his absence, it suffers a pervasive lack of accessibility. With this grant, we aspire to reconstruct Kaplan's taxonomy and rectify years of slow deterioration in the humid Florida climate, reopening the rich array of information to the international community of researchers. Through the re-housing and basic preservation and conservation of the materials, the creation of an electronic finding aid and the bibliographic inclusion in the WorldCat database/online catalog, Brooklyn College hopes to advocate and to protect for posterity the core of what is ultimately intended as the definitive national boxing archive.