The Illinois Newspaper Project (INP) is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and administered by the Library of Congress as part of the U.S. Newspaper Program (USNP) and the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Both programs involve a cooperative effort between the states and the federal government designed to preserve the nation's historic newspaper heritage.

Under the USNP, the INP team travels throughout Illinois inventorying and cataloging collections held by libraries and repositories, private organizations, and individuals. We host a web-based searchable database of all newspapers discovered and preserved through the project. Newspapers that have not already been preserved on microfilm are filmed to create a permanent record of this vanishing material. All microfilm produced for INP is made available to Illinois citizens through interlibrary loan.

Under the NDNP, the INP team is charged with selecting and digitizing historically significant Illinois titles to be aggregated and permanently maintained by the Library of Congress via the Chronicling America database. 100,000 pages of Illinois newsprint published before 1923 will be digitized during every two year cycle of grant funding.

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 Library. 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 1989-2009 in the 19 northernmost Illinois counties. The UIUC Library has been responsible for central and southern Illinois counties since June 1995 and currently hosts the staff for all aspects of the project.