Illinois State Museum

The Illinois State Museum Society will create a Web module, the Audio-Video Barn, featuring digital oral histories of people involved in Illinois’s agriculture and rural life. Partnering with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Illinois, the Regional History Center at Northern Illinois University, and Randforce Associates, LLC, of the University at Buffalo Technology Incubator in New York, the museum will combine archived interviews with new oral histories. Interviews archived at partner institutions will be digitized, and all data will be indexed to improve access. The interactive Web module will provide Internet visitors with a rich view of Illinois agriculture and enable regional institutions to share their stories through individual histories.