In 2015, the Terence A. Tanner Collection of Newspapers on Microfilm was transferred to the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library from the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections. The microfilms compose part of the research collection that Tanner used while working on an article which he eventually published as “Newspapers and Printing Presses in Early Illinois” in the journal American Periodicals, Vol. 3 (1993), 100-113. The remainder of Tanner’s research collection remains in the Illinois Historical Survey and Lincoln Collections. Read more about the Terence Tanner Collection at the University of Illinois Library.
The microfilm collection was created for Tanner by Roger Bridges from the collections of the Illinois State Historical Library (now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library). This microfilm collection represents just a small portion of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library’s vast holdings of Illinois newspapers on microfilm, and many of the titles are available nowhere else. When the microfilms were originally produced, they were sent to the University of Illinois Library as a kind of extended interlibrary loan. In 2002, Cheryl Pence, the Supervisor of Special Collections at the Illinois State Historical Library officially transferred ownership of the microfilms to the University of Illinois Library, and they now reside in the the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library where they may be used by any researcher interested in working with the newspapers from this collection.
View a list of the newspapers represented in the Terence Tanner microfilm collection.