2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lincoln/Net website hosted by Northern Illinois University Libraries. Originally funded by the Illinois State Library and the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services in 1998, the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project brought together a wide variety of primary source materials related to our sixteenth president and his historical context in antebellum Illinois (1818-1860) in the Lincoln/Net site. It remains online today at Lincoln/Net | NIUDL.
The project began as a collaboration among a number of Illinois colleges, universities, archives, and libraries, including Northern Illinois University, the Chicago History Museum (then known as the Chicago Historical Society), the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), the University of Chicago Libraries, Illinois State University Libraries, Knox College Libraries, and Lewis University Libraries. Each institution contributed a collection of digitized primary source materials shedding light on Lincoln’s life and milieu. Project staff members assembled the materials in a large, searchable database which came to include more than 20 million words and thousands of images. The image below shows the temporary structure in which Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1860.
