Peeking into the Vault: Magazine Opens Up Archives

Starting Thursday, Sports Illustrated, a Time Inc. property, will allow online users to search the magazine's complete archives, in what they're calling The Vault. Time has taken similar actions with archives for some of its other properties, including People, Time and Entertainment Weekly.

The article claims that this is a way for magazines to draw readers to their websites. True indeed, especially thanks to search engine traffic, but I don't see this as being so revolutionary. Will users really want to see a story about how great Dale Murphy was in May of 1986? There are plenty of things worth searching for -- I will promptly look up every Gary Smith article ever written -- but this strikes me as one of those things that sounds cool but is rarely used once it launches. On the plus side, it sounds like SI put together a high-quality reader to use on the site. And you can look at the ads. That might be the best part.