Newswise — The University of Illinois at Chicago Library is leading a project to plan a portal to the historical collections of 14 museums, universities and libraries that make up the Chicago Collections Consortium.

The portal will offer a one-click search of the special collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Public Library, Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago, the Newberry Library, Northeastern Illinois University, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, the University of Chicago and UIC. Users will find detailed lists of each archive’s contents and digitized materials that may be viewed online.

The planning is funded with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees on behalf of the library.

"We recognize that our individual efforts to preserve special materials can complicate researchers’ access to them. This grant will help us coordinate efforts and leverage resources—the keys to making Chicago history easily available to college students, seasoned researchers, school children, amateur historians, and the general public," said Mary M. Case, UIC university librarian and an organizer of the consortium.

"All the institutions have primary resource materials in multiple formats that tell the political, cultural, and economic history of the Chicago area -- personal papers of politicians, artists, activists, folk heroes, and prominent citizens; records of churches, community organizations, social clubs; corporate and institutional archives; in formats including photographs, audio-visual materials, maps and digital files," she said.

Case said with thousands of shelves and boxes of materials of value to researchers scattered across the city, researchers may examine materials at one library or museum without realizing that nearby repositories hold materials from the same individual or organization.

Dick Simpson, professor and head of the political science department at UIC, has written in support of the portal and said it will help researchers "make unexpected connections.

"When I wrote my book 'Rogues, Rebels, and Rubber Stamps: The Story of the Chicago City Council from 1863-present,' I had to search four different library collections in person," Simpson said. "This will accelerate our knowledge of our history for everyone. I expect to see many more books, magazine articles, and video documentaries using these resources."

The portal project will include the formation of a governance structure to ensure that the Chicago Collections Consortium can sustain and expand its activities in the future.

UIC ranks among the nation's leading research universities and is Chicago's largest university with 27,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world. For more information about UIC, please visit www.uic.edu.

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