Illinois History and Lincoln Collections

[Illinois Historical Survey and Lincoln Room]

RELOCATION:  

Manuscript collections are stored in the main stacks but are retrieved for research use in Library 422. The unit's holdings, now divided between the Illinois History Collections and Lincoln Collections, will in time be merged and more fully described. There are typed inventories for most of the collections, copies of which can be requested.  For collection information, e-mail: IHLC@library.uiuc.edu.

*The unit is staffed each weekday afternoon by a graduate assistant (Will Cooley and Dave Hageman) and by the unit head (John Hoffmann). As a rule, the unit is also open each weekday morning. The unit head is usually available to assist users at that time. Contact him to confirm his availability on any particular morning, or simply come to Library 426 (next door to Library 422).

SCOPE AND HISTORY:  

These collections bring together the holdings of two once separate units of the Library, the Illinois Historical Survey and the Lincoln Room.

The collections consist of printed and manuscript materials that support research in local and state history and in the field of Lincoln studies.

The collections contain approximately 24,000 volumes, 1,800 cubic feet of manuscripts, and a large number of maps, broadsides, prints and photographs, artifacts, and ephemera.

The unit began as two separate collections. Between 1909 and 1939, the Illinois Historical Survey mainly functioned as the editorial office of the Illinois State Historical Library, and it collected materials of immediate use in the preparation of the Centennial History of Illinois, a multi-volume study, and the Illinois Historical Collections, a documentary series. After 1939, when the state historical agency was consolidated in Springfield, the Survey became fully a part of the University and it gradually expanded its holdings in the field of Illinois history as a whole. In 1966, the unit was moved from Lincoln Hall, where it was affiliated with the Department of History, to the Library, becoming an administrative part of the Library in 1980.

The collection which forms the nucleus of the Lincoln Room was donated to the University by Harlan Hoyt Horner and Henrietta Calhoun Horner, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation in 1901. The Lincoln Room, initially maintained by the History and Philosophy Library, became the responsibility of the Illinois Historical Survey in 2001.

In 2006, the Survey and Lincoln Room were merged and relocated within the Library. The combined collections of the two units are now stored in a portion of the main stacks reached from a hallway door on the third floor. When the corridor to that area is remodeled as promised, it will again be possible for patrons to browse and use the collections directly. Meanwhile, such materials as they request on the basis of the online catalog or with the assistance of the staff are brought to them in a reading room on the fourth floor (Library 422).

The nature of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections is largely a reflection of the separate origin and development of the Illinois Historical Survey and the Lincoln Room. Both units acquired relatively comprehensive holdings of printed materials, nearly comparable to the holdings of the Illinois State Historical Library (now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library) and the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum). However, neither unit acquired manuscript collections to the extent held by the Springfield library. Throughout its formative years, the Survey, after using manuscript collections in the field of Illinois history for its documentary publications, deposited them in Springfield; and the Historical Library was well-established as a preeminent collection of Lincoln manuscripts before the University received the Horner collection. The Horners collected only printed Lincolniana, and that emphasis has been maintained, partly because the acquisition of original Lincoln manuscripts is now prohibitively expensive.