During her career, she began an extensive archive on African American history and culture, which is now known as, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, at the CPL.

Harsh attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the city's south side (which would later produce numerous other famous alumni, from Sam Cooke to the first Harlem Globetrotters).

[2][3] Harsh first began working for the Chicago Public Library as a junior clerk in 1909 and becoming a children's librarian in 1913 alongside Naomi Pollard Dobson.

Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, Horace Clayton, and Margaret Walker were among the people who participated in these forums.

[7] The Hall Library's role as a meeting place for African-American thinkers and activists had a profound impact on the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s.