Dan Glickman, a Wichita native, donated papers, letters, correspondence, photographs, newspaper articles, scrapbooks and campaign items to Wichita State University Libraries.

 He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1976-1994 and as Secretary of Agriculture from 1995-2001.

More than 8,000 items were digitized over the course of last year—from November through April—and serve as research material.

Lorraine Madway, curator of Special Collections, said the collection provides “a wonderful service.”

“We offer one of the pre-eminent sources for students and researchers,” Madway said.

Madway oversaw the digitized selection of the papers. She said she focused on Glickman’s work in aviation, agriculture and environmental issues.

“It was a wonderful intellectual challenge to decide what goes into this, but we focused on more of his congressional material,” Madway said.

Most of the online papers are primary sources written by Glickman.

“The goal is to show the records how they were used in their active lives,” Madway said.

Besides the material online, there is a display case in the bottom floor of Ablah Library that gives a sample of the range of materials available to students.

Glickman was born in Wichita, and was the 4th District Kansas representative (which includes Wichita and most of the southern central counties) from 1977 to 1995.

 “The future is young people,” Glickman said. “I hope I can offer with these papers some perspective on how to work together.”

Glickman also said that when he worked in Congress, it was a less divisive body. The papers, Glickman said, show people that government can work.

“Government can work,” he said. “We don’t need to kill ourselves to get things done…It is not impossible.”