About Illinois Harvest

The goal of the Illinois Harvest / Large-scale Digitization Initiative is to enlarge the digital collections of the University of Illinois and to provide enhanced access to those collections, as well as to digital resources about Illinois and by Illinois scholars from collections and institutions around the country.

Through this effort we will provide to faculty, students, and the wider public a window into the incredible wealth of scholarship, information, and cultural assets produced or curated by libraries, museums, government agencies, and academic institutions within the State of Illinois and elsewhere. The Illinois Harvest portal will highlight the research of University of Illinois faculty members by providing integrated access to their online articles, presentations, virtual exhibitions, lessons, and discussions.

Large-Scale Digitization Projects

In the fall of 2006 the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign entered into an agreement with the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a program of the Internet Archive, to open a pilot scanning center at the Library's Oak Street Library Facility. During its first year of operation -- starting February 2007 -- approximately 6,000 volumes from the Library's collections will be digitized at the scanning center. The digitized content will be accessible via the Library's online catalog, at the Internet Archive web site, and fully searchable over the Internet. These will include works in the public domain to do with Illinois history, culture, and natural resources, as well as in-copyright collections for which the Library has obtained permission to digitize, such as Chicago Field Museum Fieldiana Botany and Zoology series. In addition to volumes digitized as part of our collaboration with the OCA, the Library will digitize additional special collections, including University of Illinois Board of Trustees Proceedings, the Illinois Legislative Synopsis and Digest, and the University's collection of Bronze Tablets honoroing the top 3% of UIUC undergraduates. See the full list of collections being digitized for additional information.

Portal

Illinois Harvest is a unique service that provides access to publicly available online materials about or related to Illinois. The service is being developed by the University of Illinois with generous funding support from the State of Illinois. The portal will feature materials held by libraries across Illinois and beyond. These materials include among other things: research works by Illinois scholars, photos of and texts about Abraham Lincoln, copies of Illinois constitutions, World War I and II documents, historical Illinois maps and aerial photographs, documents about Illinois during the Civil War, the Bloomington-Normal Black History Project documents, and historic architectural drawings and renderings about the "built environment" of the University of Illinois.

How We Do It

The Illinois Harvest indexes, organizes, and makes available digital content in the following three broad areas:

• Digital Content about Illinois
• Digital Content by Illinois Scholars
• Digitized Cultural Assets within the Collections of University of Illinois Library

Currently the Illinois Harvest includes 82 collections.

Illinois Harvest is managed and maintained by the Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.