Overview
Given the widely dispersed body of works proliferating from talented and creative individuals across the country and the difficulty any one collective body would have in pulling together these disparate analog and digital works in a digital medium, investigation is needed to devise an approachable model that will allow interested groups and organizations to collaborate and provide access to regional art works outside of traditional venues.

The Local Artists Collection project aims to provide such a model. Using Greenstone digital library software, an open-source information organization system to collect together and provide access; a collectively shared server to reduce emphasis on contributors' geographic location; and a wealth of other electronic authoring and communication systems to facilitate collaboration, the fledgling stage of the project has pulled together glimpses into the lives and works of a number of talented artists from Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. The collection is intended to be of interest to both cultural heritage professionals and Greenstone software developers as well as anyone interested in the local artists of their region.

The Local Artists Collection is currently hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Project Contributors
This digital library started as a group project in Professor Jerome McDonough and Dr. J.Stephen Downie's Digital Libraries: Research and Practice course offered through the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Graduate School of Library and Information Science (UUIC GSLIS). Three course members, Loree Elton, Paolo Gujilde, and Venice Bayrd got together behind a good idea, and their passions and interests form the collection you see before you. Many thanks go out to our classmates and professors for their thoughtful suggestions on how to improve this project. While we received many valuable suggestions, responsibility for any undeveloped areas remains our own. More detail on the group and the project can be found on the About the Project Page.

Copyright
The artists you will see have all agreed to have their works represented in an online environment. Please be respectful of their creative labors and use these works fairly and responsibly.