Current magazine issues such as Women and Guns and Oprah are also available.

Tucked between bound volumes of Glamour and Feminist Studies, Angela Lin ’02 types furiously on her laptop.

A smattering of Chinese food cookbooks sit beside her as she works on a final project about the evolution of Chinese food in the United States for Chinese Literature 132: “Chinatowns.”

Lin says she first heard about the library’s cookbook collection from Assistant Professor Eileen Chow, who teaches the course.

“I had no idea before I came here,” she says. “I can’t believe that we have these things.”

The experience, Lin says, has made her appreciate Radcliffe more.

“In general, I have never really cared about Radcliffe,” she says. “But now I think it’s nice to have this space. There’s a more personal feeling.”

Staff members say working intimately with the collections and researchers is one of the perks of the Schlesinger.

“We’re not doing such rapid-fire research that we don’t get a chance to engage with researchers and their research,” explains librarian Sarah Hutcheon.

Questions for librarians range from detailed dissertation studies of the women’s rights movement to the history of the cream puff.

Even that, librarians say, is no light matter.

With the addition of an e-mail form to the Schlesinger website, reference requests have skyrocketed. And the questions are often more in-depth than in years past, according to librarian Ellen Shea.

A Thousand Words

In the second floor Manuscript Room, Marie-Helene Gold works with the library’s collection of over 75,000 photographs.

Though women’s history is the collection’s focal point, Gold emphasizes the evolution of the history of photography as well—from daguerreotypes to tin types to albumin prints.