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 > > ______________________________________ > To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at > http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html > ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html