Special Collections: National Service Archives to Open at IUPUI

Researchers and historians wanting to know more about civic service and volunteerism in America will soon be able to turn to new archives at IUPUI.

The National Service Archives, a collection within the Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives at University Library, will be filled with documents not available elsewhere that tell the stories of civic service and volunteerism in America.

Items include documents from the Corporation for National and Community Service; papers from leaders like Sen. Harris Wofford, who helped create the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps; and stories and documents from volunteers themselves.

“It will be the one and only place to find materials like these,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, a former chief executive officer for the Corporation for National Community Service and an IU professor emeritus. His papers will also be part of the collection.

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While University Library has long had a philanthropic studies archive, the idea for a broader archive started with Ehrlich, who was one of the people who approached Lenkowsky with the idea.

“Nobody thought about creating an archive before this, but now that AmeriCorps is a mature program with more than a million people who’ve served and that has a presence in American life, there is a lot of scholarly interest,” he said, noting that this year is the program’s 25th anniversary.

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