Digitizing Illinois Newspapers

Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections

The Illinois Newspaper Project (INP) digitizes Illinois newspapers and makes them freely available online. Our goal is to digitize and provide access to as much of Illinois’s newspaper heritage as possible. You can access the newspapers we have digitized through the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. Illinois newspapers digitized with funding from the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) are also available through the Library of Congress Chronicling America website.

Few newspaper articles were ever indexed or cataloged, and newspaper digitization therefore makes available to researchers a vast portion of the historical record that was previously difficult to access, often demanding hours of time browsing through newspapers—issue-by-issue, page-by-page—on microfilm. Because of digitization, many of these articles are being discovered for the first time, sometimes quite serendipitously in newspapers that researchers never even thought to consult. And, of course, if you have an Internet connection at home, you can do all this research without leaving your house.

Due to copyright restrictions, we primarily digitize newspapers published prior to the year 1928 because newspapers published prior to that year are in the public domain.

Where a newspaper publisher has given us permission, however, we are able to digitize newspapers published after 1928. For example, the publisher of the Farmer’s Weekly Review gave us permission to digitize through March 2011. We are grateful to publishers who allow us to make their copyright-protected newspaper issues freely available. It’s important to note that publishers who grant us permission to digitize copyrighted newspapers do not forfeit their copyrights. They have simply granted us permission to make those newspaper issues freely available online. All subsequent uses must still respect the publisher’s copyright.

We would not be able to digitize newspapers without the generous support of our partners, which include other institutions, grant-funding agencies, private-sector businesses, public-sector organizations, and individuals.

 

Other Digitized Newspapers in Illinois

We also try to track other projects that digitize and provide freely available access to Illinois newspapers. Most of these projects are run out of pubic libraries and historical societies and are either hosted on library websites or supported by vended services.

Some Newspapers We’ve Digitized

Visit the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections to access the full text of all the newspapers we’ve digitized.