Free Illinois cards are limited to residents of each library's taxing district (Illinois residents outside any district must buy a nonresident card). Your home card gives in-person reciprocal borrowing at most Illinois libraries — but that reciprocity does not extend to ebooks.
The Digital Library of Illinois is the state's largest Libby pool, shared by hundreds of suburban and downstate libraries. Other regional pools include Media On Demand (south and west Cook suburbs), eMediaLibrary (DuPage and Fox Valley), the North Suburban Digital Consortium, the Pinnacle Digital Consortium (Will County), OMNI Libraries (northern Illinois and the Quad Cities), the Alliance Digital Media Library (Peoria and west-central Illinois) and the Rolling Prairie Digital Consortium (central and southern Illinois). The big independent collections worth collecting are Chicago, plus suburban stand-alones like Skokie, Evanston, Naperville, Aurora, Orland Park and Gail Borden (Elgin). A few systems — Rockford, Arlington Heights, and Illinois Heartland members like Decatur and Belleville — lend ebooks through cloudLibrary instead of Libby.
Illinois has roughly 600 library districts; this map focuses on the independents and the larger members of each shared pool. A few suburban pool assignments can shift as consortia merge — check the library's website before a trip.
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