The collection was formed by the Canadian puppeteer Rosalynde Osborne Stearn as a comprehensive library on the puppet theatre with representative examples of puppets characteristic of different periods and countries. It includes some 2714 books and periodicals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the puppet theatre in various European languages as well as scripts for puppet plays. The collection contains 171 puppets from Europe, Asia (including shadow puppets), and the Americas, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Also included are toy theatres, theatrical portraits, paintings, prints and posters.

The collection consists of reports and plans for urban and rural areas from all provinces of Canada and some international cities, including Boston, New York, Chicago, France, and London, dating from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Most of the material consists of plans and reports for future land-uses that are revised, usually every decade. It also includes regulations for these areas, such as zoning. Some reports deal with sectorial policies such as housing, transportation, conservation, or environmental protection.

The collection consists primarily of recordings on audio cassette of beginner-level language lessons in Ojibwa, Cree, and Inuktitut; authored variously by Basil Johnston, S.T. Mallon et al., C. Douglas Ellis et al., and Louis-Philippe Vaillancourt. The majority of the included material dates from the 1970s. The accompanying language learning texts for the Ojibwa and Inuktitut audiocassettes are included in the collection, along with duplicate recordings of 35 of the Cree audiocassettes on 25 compact discs. The collection also contains a recording of the 1995 CBC Calgary radio program "Voices of the First Nations : The Prairies."

Macdonell's papers comprise a journal for 1793-1795, which L.R. Masson entitled "Assinoboines-Rivière Qu'appelle", and an account of the Red River, approximately 1797.