The Quad Cities area is lucky to have several well-managed libraries and archives that preserve local history materials. If you need to search beyond our holdings here at Augustana, the following institutions may be able to meet your needs:
If you are particularly interested in genealogy and immigration, these institutions may be relevant:
Newspapers are notoriously difficult to preserve, index, and make accessible in their original, physical form. Newspapers were (and still are) printed on inexpensive wood pulp paper that was thin, cheap, highly acidic, and never intended to last very long. As the paper deteriorates, they become so embrittled that they often crumble at the slightest touch. Because of this, and to save space, many newspapers were copied onto microfilm in the 1980's and 90's. With advances in technology, some of those microfilmed newspapers have now been scanned, and some of our local papers here in the Quad Cities are now freely available for full-text searching online: