The fonds consists chiefly of student notebooks kept by F. Clarke Fraser while an undergraduate at Acadia University during the late 1930s-1940. They represent a variety of subjects, including zoology, physics, mathematics, and biology. Two notebooks date from his Med IV year (1949-1950) at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, one with ophthalmology lab and clinical notes and reading and lecture notes, and one an obstetrical diary from the Montreal Maternity Hospital. Also included is a later reprint of an article (published 1957), loose notes, and a photograph of F. Clarke Fraser and a companion dining at the Montreal restaurant Au lutin qui bouffe, famous for its resident piglet, which restaurant-goers were often photographed holding and feeding.

The fonds contains the majority of the drawings and papers of Montreal architect and landscape architect John Schreiber, who was a professor in the School of Architecture at McGill from 1953 to 1987. These documents constitute a rich treasure of original design work, expressed in draughtsmanship of great virtuosity. John Schreiber’s work is an example of the contribution to Canadian architecture and landscape architecture of a generation of Europeans who, leaving that war-shattered continent in the late forties and fifties, found an appreciative and fertile ground for their talents and ambitions in Canada. The two hundred and thirty four projects represented in the Schreiber fonds span half a century of work and are documented in more than four thousand plans and drawings, hundreds of photographs and close to six linear metres of textual files.

The fonds comprises nine series (including seven main categories of information) of records on the life and career of Frederick B. Taylor. It is the largest collection to date on Frederick B. Taylor. Biographical Information includes an excerpt from an unpublished autobiographical manuscript, Essays includes works such as "Reflections on painting Stephen Leacock", Photographs includes both professional and social snapshots. Two main facets of the Archive which hold particular interest are Works and Correspondence. Works includes over 1550 reproductions of Taylor's work. This selection is a cross-section of Taylor's artistic mediums and includes painting (landscape, industrial, portrait, still-life), etching, drawing, sculpture as well as six original prints and seven original canvases located at McGill University. Correspondence comprises some 2000 letters, documents or memorandums, spans from the early 1920s up until Taylor's death in 1987 and is divided into professional and personal series. The professional series focuses primarily on the relationships Taylor held with various private galleries and exhibitors of his work including the Klinkhoff, Kastel and Dominion Galleries in Montreal, the Roberts Gallery in Toronto as well as numerous Canadian public galleries and museums which remain repositories of Taylor's work, among them the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The personal section demonstrates Taylor's substantial and often life-long relationships with his family and friends, among them, artists André Bieler, Alan Harrison and Carl Allen Smart as well as Paul Wakefield and Colin Wyatt.

Typed transcriptions of Charles McKenzie’s narratives about the Indigenous people of MIssouri, draft and revised draft before publication; Alexander Henry’s account entitled: “Account of a visit to the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians in 1806”; and John Macdonell’s “The Red River”. Also includes drafts for work entitled, "Early fur trade on the Northern Plains : Canadian traders among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818 : the narratives of John Macdonell, David Thompson, Franc̦ois-Antoine Larocque, and Charles McKenzie" / edited and with an introduction by W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen. Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Approximately half this material consists of letters, covering the years 1823-1837, from Andrew William Cochran, 1792-1849, civil secretary to the governors of Lower Canada from 1812 onwards, and a member of the Executive Council from 1827 to 1841. The remainder comprises a number of accounts of travels and exploration by North West Company employees, probably collected by McKenzie for his history. Included are Charles McKenzie's expeditions amongst the Otoe Missouria Tribe.; Edward Umfreville's journal of a canoe trip from Lake Superior to Portage de l'Isle 1784; accounts of the Alaskan Athabaskans, 1795 and 1805, George Keith's memoirs of the McKenzie River Department, 1807-1817; and George Henry Monk's of the Department of Fond du Lac or Mississippi, 1807; John McDonnell's account of the Red River, ca 1787; and John Johnston's of Lake Superior and a letter on the Indigenous communities of the northwest from Eneas McDonnell. Also included are letters written to McKenzie from Forks on the Mackenzie River by William Ferdinand Wentzel, 1807-1824.

The fonds contains correspondence related to the Osler Library and its holdings with people such as Maude Abbott, Edward Archibald, William B. Bean, Edward Horton Bensley, Archibald Malloch, Casey Wood, as well as John Farquhar Fulton, Keeper of the Medical History Collections at Yale University's library; the fonds also contains a typescript of talks by W.W. Francis (titled "Showman's Patter") about books and other items held in the Osler Library.

These fonds comprise 12 softbound manuscript volumes of lectures, plays, notes and ephemera by Oswald Hughes. The first manuscript is a lecture entitled: "Descriptive lecture on the Mail Route through Italy".

Consisting of documents detailing the 1785 travels and observations of Joseph Hadfield through the Northwest fur trade of North America and to Niagara Falls (probably written after 1810). Observations are primarily economic in nature; however, there are also references to the geographical and cultural surroundings.

The fonds contains photographs, drawings, textual records, and other material used by France Gagnon Pratte as the basis for her 1987 book, "Country Houses for Montrealers, 1892 - 1924: The Architecture of E. and W.S. Maxwell". There are also records related to a book project on the architecture associated with the Canadian Pacific Railway Line.