The fonds primarily reflects Pappius’s activities as a researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (MNI/H): both her experimental research as such and various support activities, including academic publication, coordination of research projects with colleagues, and acquiring funding. It also contains much information about her leadership of the Clinical Neurochemistry Laboratory. The fonds contains smaller amounts of documentation regarding her activities as a professor at McGill University, her administrative roles at the MNI/H, and her participation in professional organizations, which reflects the smaller place that those roles occupied in her professional life.

The period of time best documented in the fonds spans the early 1980s to Pappius’s retirement in 1995. Correspondence with colleagues, mostly though not exclusively work-related, contains relatively more material from Pappius’s early career; although, here too, most of the material dates from the 1980s and after.

The main document types in the fonds related to Pappius’s research activities are experiment worksheets and printed tabular research data. Many of the research-related files contain negatives of autoradiographies, with a smaller number of photographic prints. Correspondence can be found in many series besides series F (Correspondence), as much of Pappius’s work was collaborative in nature.

The fonds is divided into eight series: (A) Research, (B) Academic events, (C) Teaching, (D) Administrative activities, (E) Professional organizations, (F) Correspondence, (G) Personal collections, and (H) Visual documents.