The Illinois Newspaper Project (INP) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library has received a grant of $299,977 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to digitize 100,000 pages of historical Illinois newspapers, as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the NEH and the Library of Congress. An NDNP partner since 2009, the Illinois Newspaper Project has contributed over 500,000 pages of digitized newspaper content.

The goal of the 2022-2024 grant is to digitize newspapers from geographically and demographically diverse Illinois communities. To this end, newspapers will be selected through a proposal process open to all Illinois libraries and cultural heritage repositories. Celestina Savonius-Wroth (head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library) and William Schlaack (Digital Reformatting Coordinator for Preservation Services) will lead the project.