Historical and Genealogical Index
The Historical and Genealogical Index, begun in 1995, is an outgrowth of the Archives' initial indexing projects of the 1960s and 1970s, which resulted in a 400,000-card name index to many Champaign County governmental records of genealogical interest. Intended to both reformat the information already indexed on cards and expand upon the work that had been done by computer indexing other local history resources, the Historical and Genealogical Index has achieved its initial goals and greatly surpassed them. The index contains over 435,000 records which include 2.5 million individual entries, over 1.2 million of which are personal names. A dynamic entity, the Historical and Genealogical Index is added to weekly and grows at a rate of more than 3,000 records and 20,000 entries per month on average.
Urbana Municipal Documents Index
The Urbana Municipal Documents Index to City of Urbana government records was begun by the Library in 1979 with the establishment of the Urbana Municipal Documents Center, a joint project of the City of Urbana and The Urbana Free Library. This cooperative project, nationally unique at its inception, gave both City of Urbana staff and residents improved access to municipal information through microfilming of records and computer-generated indexes available in City offices and the Library. From the Center's beginning through its closing in 2003, a wide variety of City records were indexed, including meetings of the City Council and other City committees and commissions, City ordinances and resolutions, permits, plans, and reports. In all, the Urbana Municipal Documents Index contains nearly one half million individual entries for the more than 63,000 municipal records and documents dating from 1855 through 2001 that were indexed. Although records for current documents are not being added at this time, indexing continues at a modest rate.
