History online

After six years of popular use, two simple truths emerge about the World Wide Web: not everything you want to know and use is instantly available, and most people still need help to find what they want. This is the first in a series of columns reviewing sources of Illinois history available on the Internet. This article focuses on state government agencies. For easy access, all sites mentioned are linked to "The Illinois History Resource Page"

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~sorensen/hist.html. It should be noted that many sites display material in pdf. files that require the user to have "Adobe Acrobat Reader" software www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html on their computer.

The official State of Illinois web site is run by the governor's office and is located at www.statc.il.us/. This site contains links to all statewide elected officials, state agencies, the legislature and judiciary. From the governor's state page there are connections to: the proposed Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, a tour of the Executive Mansion (requiring more special software), facts about Illinois and its state symbols, lyrics to the State Song, and detailed census profiles from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs.

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency www.state.il.us/hpa/ has links to a "Directory of Historical Museums in Illinois," and to the Lincoln Legals Project that contains an essay about Lincoln's law career. The IHPA site also has links to all official historic sites in Illinois but unfortunately does not provide much detail about the people or events commemorated.

The Illinois State Historical Library, www.state.il.us/hpa/lib/ allows an online search of its holdings by title, author, subject, or keyword. Its site is one of several that offers a "Chronology of Illinois History," but is fairly unique in its essay about "African Americans in Illinois." Like most state agencies that have a web presence, the ISHL does not allow for easy exchange of electronic information or questioning by the public. Its online research policy emphatically states: "E-mail requests are NOT accepted." Because of a lack of staff available to answer a variety of reference questions, most government agencies do not encourage random queries.

Some agencies, however, deal with the same kind of information over and over again and have developed online forms to request specific items. The Illinois Department of Public Health's Division of Vital Records allows the public to request birth and death certificates as well as divorce records by using and sending online forms from their website www.idph.state.il.us/vital/vitalhome.htm.

The Illinois Secretary of State (State Librarian and State Archivist) allows e-mail reference service through "Ask the Illinois State Library" cyberdriveilliois.com/library/isl/re/email ref.html. This site also encourages the public to contact their local Illinois library for information of a regional nature using the "ILLINET Library Directory" www.cyberdriveillinois.com/library/lib dir/lib dir.html. The State Library's sister agency, the Illinois State Archives, allows patrons to submit an online form requesting information and copies of documents from its collection.

The State Archives, www.sos.statc.il.us/departments/archives/ archives. html. is perhaps the most popular state supported website, getting over 8 million online hits in the past year. Its staff maintains 49 online databases that can be searched simultaneously by name of person or place. The most popular abstracts of records in the online collection are the Public Domain Land Sales, the Civil War Muster Roll, and the pre-1900 Statewide Marriage Index.

An online search of the Archives' holdings of state and local government records can also be made at the record series level. While its 80,000 cubic feet of material will never be totally accessible online, a sample of Lincoln documents has been digitized and put on the web. Primary source documents have also been formatted into document-teaching packages and one set is already online with more to follow.

One of the best history reference tools to go online from a state agency is the Illinois Blue Book 2000 www.sos.state.il.Lis/bh/toc.html. This Illinois Secretary of State publication has appeared every other spring since 1900 and contains a list and photos of all current statewide government officials, legislators, and judges and describes their duties. It also contains Congressional information, historical chronology, lists of all previous state office holders, detailed results of the last election, the State Constitution, and an index of all previous members of the Illinois General Assembly The 2001-2002 edition is due out in April 2002.

The Illinois General Assembly has made all laws in Illinois since 1818. The General Assembly website has helped to strip away some of the mystery of this process at www.legis.state.il.us/. Both houses now have their journals and votes online and will soon have live audio, if not video, of their sessions on the Internet. All proposed laws and resolutions have been online for the past three assemblies. You can do a full text search of any proposal since 1997 at www.legis.state.il.us/legisnet/legismain.html. To research existing laws, go to the online Illinois Compiled Statutes, www.legis.state.il.us/ilcs/chapterlist.html. maintained by the Legislative Reference Bureau. The Supreme Court Library presents a step-by-step method of "How to Research an Illinois Legislative History" at www.state.il.us/court/SupremeCourt/ Library Research. htm.

The Supreme and Appellate courts, www.state.il.us/court/. have also made their Opinions from the past five years available online. Similarly, the office of the Illinois Attorney General, www.ag.state.il.ns/. has provided an Index of its Opinions since 1992 and access to all documents beginning with 1995. These opinions are the official position of the state on current legal matters and cite a number of court cases as precedent.

If you have suggestions for Illinois History Internet articles, please e-mail Mark Sorensen at: msorensen@ilsos.net..

Mark W. Sorensen is Assistant Director of the Illinois State Archives. He is a life member of the Illinois State Historical Society and has maintained the "Illinois History Resource Page" www.alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~sorensen/hist.html since 1995.

ILLINOIS HERITAGE 21