A cavernous collection of boxing memorabilia has completed the journey from a Florida garage to the brick-and-ivy campus of the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, according to a New York Times article published today. The college acquired the collection, appraised at $2.94-million, from Hank Kaplan, a former boxing journalist who kept thousands of newspaper clippings, photographs, boxing gloves, and champion belts in his house and two-car garage until his death last year at 88.

The archive, which features the heavy bag Cassius Clay punched before renaming himself Muhammad Ali and a gold cigarette case that the heavyweight Max Baer gave his trainer, will now share space with Robert Frost first editions and the correspondence of local civic leaders at the Brooklyn College Library.

The collection, currently housed in a 10-foot-high chamber in the Brooklyn College archives with a small, public display in the library itself, is not yet available to researchers. But Anthony M. Cucchiara, a professor of archival management at Brooklyn College who is also an amateur boxer and who met with Mr. Kaplan before his death, is trying to raise $200,000 to house it in acid-free storage, to study and catalog it. He said that the history of boxing, with its fierce ethnic rivalries and close-knit neighborhood gyms, illuminates the history of America in general and New York specifically.

“I suppose some people would turn their noses up at a boxing collection,” said Mr. Cucchiara. “But the story of America is in this archive.” —Ingrid Norton