In 1998, Northeastern University announced that it had received a two-year federal grant to “identify, locate, secure, and make accessible the most important and at-risk historical records of Boston’s African American, Chinese, gay and lesbian, and Latino communities.” Later that year, I met Joan Krizack, Northeastern’s University Archivist and Head of Special Collections, who had conceived the “Documenting Diversity Project.” I could see immediately that this diminutive woman (who has been a member of the Jewish Women’s Archive Technical Advisory Committee since 2006) had a “tiger by the tail” and was not about to let it go.
