Diana:

It really kind of depends what you are looking for.  There is no entity 
in Illinois called Library of Illinois equivalent to the Library of 
Virginia.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign does have a University 
Archives.  (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/archives).  You can check their 
web site but their focus is more University history.  There is also a 
departmental library dedicated to Illinois history 
(http://www.library.uiuc.edu/ihx).  I used this library when I was a 
student at UIUC; they had things like the Illinois state censuses on 
microfilm and a collection of county histories.

There are also the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield 
(the state capital) that encompasses the old Illinois State Historical 
Library.  (http://www.alplm.org/library/genealogy.html)  They have a 
good run of newspapers on microfilm for the state of Illinois as well as 
printed books like county histories.

Also in Springfield is the Illinois State Archives 
(http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/archives/archives.html).  
They have a collection of genealogy databases online and do have some 
mail services.  There are also regional archives that are part of the 
state system called IRAD (information is on the web site).  In each 
Archives Region the local archives collects materials for those 
counties.  You would need to look at the information about the 
particular regional archive that covered your county of interest for 
what they had and how it could be accessed.  The IRADs are located on 
other university campuses in Illinois and tend to have lots of student 
helper staff.

My email program did not create the URLs as live links so you will need 
to copy and paste them into your browser.

I hope this helps.

An Illinoisan relocated to Wisconsin.

Diana Bennett wrote:
> Does the Library of Illinois have an Archives and History dept?
>
> Diana
>
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