The Illinois Newspaper Project (INP) began as part of the United States Newspaper Program (USNP), a cooperative effort between the states and the federal government designed to identify, catalog, and preserve on microfilm the nation's historic newspaper heritage. The USNP was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and administered by the Library of Congress, who are currently funding the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), of which the INP is now a part.
Since its establishment in 1987, the INP has been staffed by librarians from the Illinois State Historical Library (ISHL), the Chicago Historical Society (CHS), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library, respectively. The ISHL, now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (ALPL), participated from 1987 to 1995. The CHS, now the Chicago History Museum (CHM), worked on the project from 1989 to 2009 in the 19 northernmost Illinois counties. When the UIUC Library joined the project in June 1995 (and the INP relocated its offices there), it became responsible for the central and southern Illinois counties.
During the inventorying and microfilming phase of the project, the INP team traveled throughout Illinois inventorying and cataloging collections held by libraries and repositories, private organizations, and individuals. Newspapers that had not already been preserved on microfilm were filmed to create a permanent record of this vanishing material.
A major goal of the INP is to facilitate access to Illinois newspapers and to preserve them. The project's web site hosts a searchable database of all newspapers that have been discovered and preserved. All microfilm produced for the INP is available to users through interlibrary loan.
Read more about Illinois Newspaper Project: Illinois Newspaper Project Database, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words illinois, newspaper and/or project:
“An Illinois woman has invented a portable house which can be carried about in a cart or expressed to the seashore. It has also folding furniture and a complete camping outfit.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors.... I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“If we should swap a good library for a second-rate stump speech and not ask for boot, it would be thoroughly in tune with our hearts. For deep within each of us lies politics. It is our football, baseball, and tennis rolled into one. We enjoy it; we will hitch up and drive for miles in order to hear and applaud the vitriolic phrases of a candidate we have already reckoned we’ll vote against.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)