Illinois State Info from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress Digital Reference Section has produced an Illinois State Guide to digital resources on the LOC site. It comes in four parts: under "American Memory," 23 collections to search with samples of what's in them pulled out; 9 "Related Resources"; 8 "External Links"; and a brief, quirky "Selected Bibliography" that manages to omit Robert Howard's pedestrian but standard Illinois: A History of the Prairie State, Donald Miller's brilliant City of the Century, and William Cronon's modern-day classic Nature's Metropolis. If you don't find something to make your heart beat faster and distract you from what you should be doing, you may not actually have Illinois research targets, you may only think you do!

No other midwestern state has such a detailed guide, but LOC has functionally similar resources for every state. More on some of these later.

Hat tip to the Resource Shelf, which posts more items every day than will fit on my little protopage viewing widget!