Bea Phi ‘24

My primary project was handling the library of the Asian American Writers' Workshop which, after a decade or so of neglect, had become badly disorganized and functionally unusable in so far as you could not locate a title nor author by any meaningful system—alphabetization, genre, or otherwise.

In ten weeks, I was able to take a disheveled collection of over five thousand items and categorize them both by genre and alphabetization so that they had the same degree of organizational sophistication as a library or bookstore. They were double indexed, meaning that you could find them using physical finding aids as well as a digital spreadsheet where their metadata was labeled, meaning that anyone could find exactly what they needed with ease and accuracy. As an offshoot of that, I also pored through a literal ton of organizational files, mostly papers but also multimedia objects, to declutter the office space and make decisions about what to keep and archive. 

Last but not least, I was put partially in charge of the personal library of the late poet Meena Alexander, which I unpacked with care and organized as well. The aforementioned project, while overseen by two supervisors in a remote capacity, was almost entirely done by me and would not have been completed in my absence. Staff members occasionally came in to lend a hand once a week, but I was in charge of doing much of the brunt work and holding myself accountable to the project's completion. It has been a tentative project of the organization for about a decade, only ever partially completed with varying success by previous fellows and never enough capacity provided by the already busy staff, but my participation thanks to the funding of Stanford has made it possible for the Asian American Writers' Workshop to finally have a working library. For that, I thank Stanford for giving me such a wonderful opportunity to make a lasting imprint in this community to which I owe very much.