University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Working With Illinois State Library to Digitize Government Documents

From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library:

Working with the Illinois State Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Library is actively digitizing State of Illinois publications. As part of its broader digitization efforts, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was approached by its partners to contribute published documents of Illinois’ state government for digitization.
After identifying approximately 42,000 state documents in its collections, the University Library approached the Illinois State Library for assistance in ensuring that those digitized documents could be made publicly available.
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As part of its broader digitization efforts, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Library contributed over 90,000 U.S. Federal documents to a similar digitization project several years ago. The State of Illinois government publications projects continues a strong tradition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Library to make public information available.
“Although we are only one-third of the way through the state documents project, we know that the titles that we have digitized have been discovered by users. That is, after all, part of our mission as a library—to ensure that individuals are given the opportunity to find resources and use them in their personal or professional work,” said Tom Teper, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Technical Services and Associate Dean of Libraries.
“Our libraries are committed to strengthening democracy through access to information,” added John Wilkin, Dean of Libraries. “The Illinois State Library and the Secretary of State’s Office were tremendously helpful partners in this effort. We are grateful for their vision in moving this forward.”
To date, this project has led to the digitization of 14,000 of the publications. Following established procedures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the digitized documents are being made available to the general public via the HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org) with a special collection available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?c=959679802;a=listis.

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