Special Focus

Did you know that you can go online to find Steve Patterson's golf tips and all the articles on dog parks published in Illinois Parks & Recreation magazine? Yes, Illinois Parks & Recreation magazine has been online since 1999, thanks to a partnership with Northern Illinois University Libraries and the Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) project.

That's right. Simply visit the Web sites of the Illinois Association of Park Districts (www.ILparks.org) or the Illinois Park and Recreation Association (www.ilipra.org), click on publications and Illinois Parks & Recreation magazine to find "Illinois Parks & Recreation Online." This will link you to the IPO project where you can search by key word or author name to find archived articles of the magazine, from the current issue through 1970.

About the IPO Project

In 1997, the Northern Illinois University Libraries, located in DeKalb, successfully applied for a grant to the Illinois State Library for the Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) project. The project was awarded three separate grants through the Illinois State Library's Educate and Automate funds. The project is intended to benefit Illinois citizens and the library community by providing public domain Internet access to Illinois-based magazines covering many topics of interest about the state.

IPO is a large digital imaging project. Participating magazines currently are being scanned and placed on the IPO Web site (http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/). Subject coverage includes many areas of interest in the arts, recreation, politics, commerce, biography, civics, genealogy, education, history, environment, science and other topics. The Web site is targeted to an audience of general readers, including citizens in all age groups, adolescents to older adults. The goal of IPO is to make long back-runs of these magazines available in a Web site that is fully key word searchable, including authors, titles and subjects. The project uses FineReader Academic 4.0 OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Each article is scanned then reformatted in HTML format.

To date, the IPO project features eight magazines: Illinois Country Living; Illinois Heritage, Illinois History: A Magazine for Young People; Illinois History Teacher; Illinois Issues; Illinois Municipal Review; Illinois Parks & Recreation, and Outdoor Illinois. The digital imaging of these titles is an ongoing process. The goal is to scan a magazine's entire back-run up to the current time.

So, get online and check it out. You can search by key word or browse through an entire back issue of Illinois Parks & Recreation. This is an excellent research tool and an easy way to access a valuable resource published by IAPD and IPRA.

ANN M. LONDRIGAN
is the publications director for the Illinois Association of Park Districts and the editor Illinois Parks & Recreation magazine. Information about the IPO was excerpted from the IPO Web site. Although back issues of the magazine are available online, Londrigan still welcomes readers' calls about previously published articles by so-and-so about such-and-such.

November/December 2001 ¦ 27