IPO is a large digital imaging project that will evolve over a period of years. Participating magazines are currently being scanned and placed on the IPO Web site http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/. Subject coverage includes many areas of interest in the arts, recreation, politics, commerce, biography, civics, genealogy, education, history, environment, science and other topics. The Web site is targeted to an audience of general readers, including citizens in all age groups, adolescents to older adults.

The magazines that currently or eventually will participate in the IPO project are available by subscription and may also be found in libraries. Some magazines are starting to develop their own full-text Web sites, though access is limited to recent issues and possibly to selected articles. The goal of IPO is to make long backruns of these magazines available in a Web site that is fully keyword searchable, including authors, titles and subjects. The project uses FineReader Academic 4.0 OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Each article is scanned then re-formatted in HTML format.

To date, the IPO project has reached agreement with ten journals; Illinois Country Living, Illinois Heritage, Illinois History : A Magazine for Young People, Illinois History Teacher, Illinois Issues, Illinois Libraries, Illinois Municipal Review, Illinois Parks & Recreation, and Outdoor Illinois. The digital imaging of these titles is an ongoing process. The goal is to scan a magazine's entire backrun up to the current time. Coverage may entail decades worth of issues. The project director works with the magazines' editors to determine the exact extent of coverage. The IPO Web page also has links to a number of related Illinois sites.