“What Grief Sounds Like in Your Language”: Building a Bilingual Grief Collection for Mandarin-Speaking Communities

This session presents the development and community impact of the first bilingual Mandarin-English grief collection at the Grievers Library-a digital archive of grief resources designed to support individuals navigating loss. Initiated in response to a significant gap in available resources, this project reimagines archival curation through the lenses of emotional accessibility, cultural relevance, and linguistic inclusion.The session will begin with a 25-minute presentation by the project creator, detailing the process of designing a new taxonomy for grief, sourcing and annotating over 70 resources, and building a fully bilingual, culturally grounded collection accessible through WorldCat and public libraries. This presentation will highlight how grief intersects with archival values, particularly when considering emotional literacy, access barriers, and the unspoken trauma of exclusion from public memory.
Following the presentation, a discussion will be facilitated by a grief-informed librarian and community archivist, focusing on the ethical challenges of representing grief across language and culture, and the potential for archives to serve as care infrastructures, not just memory repositories.
The final 15–20 minutes will be an open conversation, inviting attendees to explore how archivists can center multilingual communities, trauma-informed practices, and emotional accessibility in future digital collections.This session is intended for archivists, librarians, digital humanists, and professionals interested in inclusive collection development, public grief, or language justice. It aims to provide insights into expanding archival practices to be more inclusive.

This session centers Mandarin-speaking grief experiences and highlights a bilingual collection built in collaboration with multigenerational Chinese American communities. The presenter draws from personal, linguistic, and cultural experience as a bilingual practitioner. The project advances linguistic inclusion, emotional accessibility, and trauma-informed design, offering a model for culturally grounded digital collections. By focusing on grief, care, and language justice, this session promotes the stewardship of a more diverse and emotionally resonant archival profession-one that reflects the needs of immigrant communities, expands who archives are for, and redefines what counts as archive

Panel Discussion