Related Digital Collections and Research Projects

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Collection on the Internet Archive

As a member of the Open Content Alliance, the library of the University of Illinois is contributing digital content to the Internet Archive in several areas: Illinois history, culture and natural resources; U.S. railroad history; rural studies and agriculture; works in translation; as well as extensive collections of 19th century "triple-decker" novels and emblem books written between 1540 and 1800.

Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection

Historic newspapers provide us with a window on our past, and now digital technology has revolutionized access to this rich source material. The Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection (IDNC) contains digital facsimiles of historic Illinois newspapers. You can browse the newspapers by date or search by keyword across articles, advertisements and photo captions. You can print, download, or e-mail individual articles. And it's free!

Farm, Field and Fireside Agricultural Newspaper Collection

The Farm, Field and Fireside collection contains historically significant U.S. farm weeklies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Illinois Digital Magazine and Yearbook Collection

The Ilinois Digital Magazine and Yearbook Collection contains the following Illinois related magazine and year book publications:  Arts for America (1894-1900); The Illinois Chemist (1915-1921); The Illinois Society of Architects Monthly Bulletin (1916-1932); and The Illio (1970-1989).

University of Illinois Board of Trustees Archive

Contains digitized copies of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees proceedings beginning in 1867.

Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. The University of Illinois Library is a contributing member of the BHL and, in collaboration with the Chicago Field Museum, is scanning and contributing all publications in the Museum's Fieldiana series. Fieldiana is a peer-reviewed monographic series published by the Field Museum of Natural History. Fieldiana focuses on mid-length monographs and scientific papers pertaining to its collections and research. The four series pertain to subject matter in the fields of anthropology, botany, geology, and zoology.

Lorado Taft Papers, 1857-1953 | University of Illinois

Papers of Lorado Taft, B.L. 1879, M.L. 1880 (1860-1936), including diaries (1876-78), course notes and themes (1875-79), general correspondence (1881-1936), family correspondence (1882-1900, 1918-30), lecture notes, manuscripts, photographs, newspaper clippings, books and reprints, autobiographical accounts and obituaries, concerning Don Carlos Taft, Champaign and the University of Illinois, École des Beaux Arts (1880-85), sculptures, casts, monuments, bas reliefs, busts and medals (1883-1936), photographs of French and American sculpture (1845-1920), travel, business affairs, children, History of American Sculpture (1903), lectures and teaching (1914-34), columns for Chicago newspapers on art, honors and awards, Dream Museum, YMCA service in /World War I, art organizations (1919-34), travel in Europe and related topics.

Open Emblem Portal

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosts the OpenEmblem Portal. The site aims to be a resource for emblem book researchers from around the world, helping them share resources and discuss with others in the emblem book community.

Historic Aerial Photo Imagebase

Aerial photos of several Illinois counties, including Champaign, from the late 1930s through the late 1950s.

University of Illinois Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Projects

Links to electronic copies of finding aids, including box and folder listings. In some cases, digital surrogates of documents in a collection are also available via hyperlink, particularly within the James B. Reston Papers finding aid.

Research Projects

The University Library conducts a broad range of digital projects. It digitizes library collections and archives, researches information retrieval technologies for digital collections, and initiates various digital library research projects. This page serves to highlight the University Library's research projects connected with digital services and development.

• University of Illinois Digital Library Testbed

  A Web-based retrieval system featuring enhanced access and display capabilities for journal articles supplied in SGML format.

• Illinois Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project

  Focuses on creating a deep, domain-specific portal to search metadata that describes selected manuscript archives and digitized cultural heritage resources.

• IMLS Digital Collections and Content

  An effort to make the digital content of IMLS National Leadership Grant projects more visible and more usable, by building a registry of the collections and an item-level metadata repository for them.

• Second Generation Digital Mathematics Resources
  (with Innovative Content for Metadata Harvesting and Courseware Development)

  Develops added content and functionality for the websites of two mathematical digital libraries, the MathWorld and Functions.

• University of Illinois OAI Provider & Harvesting Tools on SourceForge

  The Open Source OAI tools developed for the Illinois Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project.

• The ARCHON Project

  A web-based tool for archivists and manuscript curators. It automatically publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects to a user-friendly website.