Diversifying the records can be complicated, sensitive work, said Kenvi Phillips, the library’s first curator for race and ethnicity, who was hired in 2017 to help the library develop a more inclusive archive. Phillips, who was part of the team that brought Davis’ papers to Schlesinger in 2018, knows different communities have different concerns and constraints and that learning to be sensitive to a group’s particular interests or worries, as well as what questions to ask, takes care and time. To help her reach out to the Asian American diaspora, Phillips helped organize the library’s Asian American Women’s Advisory Group made up of alumnae representing Chinese American, Korean American, Filipina, and South Asian communities.

“They have been incredibly helpful in walking us through different strategies for how to approach people; they are planning networking events for us in New York and San Francisco; and they are even offering up different names of people who might want to share their stories,” said Phillips.

The advisory group includes Jeannie Park ’83, a co-founding board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard and president of the Harvard Asian American Alumni Association. Park called it an honor “to get to work with this inspiring group of connected and deeply engaged Asian American women leaders.” The group is now helping library staff think through a range of issues central to Asian American women as they work to expand their collections.

“Immigration is certainly a huge factor when talking about the Asian American community. Language issues may be a barrier. Women may be keeping journals or notes in non-English languages, or may not even speak English,” said Park. “They may also have brought very little with them to this country. They may have escaped war or other disasters and trauma. My mother, for instance, has almost no photographs from her childhood because she lost almost everything, multiple times, in the wars in Korea and in escaping from North Korea. That’s not uncommon.”

And while Kamensky anticipates new collections arriving in different languages, she isn’t worried.

“The hidden subtext of this whole effort is the language expertise of the Harvard Library bibliographers, assuming that we continue to succeed in collections that have pieces in Mandarin and Cantonese and Thai and Lao and Vietnamese and Hindi and on and on. Schlesinger can’t hire language experts to do that processing and we don’t have to, because Harvard Library already has it. In order to describe and carefully process the collections we will be leveraging the talents of our Harvard colleagues, which is a great gift.”

The recent seminars hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study have supported the library’s ongoing efforts. In 2016 the institute hosted “Native Peoples, Native Politics,” a daylong conference that capped a year of scholarly programs and initiatives at Harvard inspired and/or led by indigenous peoples. The 2018 symposium “Who Belongs? Global Citizenship and Gender in the 21st Century,” and 2019’s “Unsettled Citizens” were part of a two-year thematic focus on citizenship timed to coincide with the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, and the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment that granted citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the U.S.

“I hope this work ignites interest in the Schlesinger among Asian American women who may not even know about the library,” said Park. “I hope they start thinking about the importance of saving our history, about the legacy of their own papers and about the Schlesinger as a home for them.”