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.

Collection consists of an album of travel photographs (chiefly black and white, with some colour). Captions date the photographs to between 1946-1956 and then to between 1989-1994. The captions also include information about the photographs themselves. The first portion of the album contains photographs taken in Niagara Falls, Manitoulin Island, northern Ontario, Bermuda, the Maritime provinces, and the United States, including Howe Caverns, Fort Williams, New York, Yellowstone National Park, Plymouth Rock, Washington, New Orleans, and Mackinac Island, dated between 1946 and 1956. The second portion contains photographs dated from 1898-1994 and documents travel to Israel, Albania, the former Yugoslavia, Russia, Estonia, England, Greece, Costa Rica, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Ukraine. The album is cloth bound in blue with the title "Snaps" in black with painted tulips.

Collection consists of papers of a British naval officer, who sailed on the Bounty. Includes notes and observations on voyages in the South Atlantic and East Indies including directions for navigating the Straits of Banquey and other oriental passages (1801), notes on the Cape of Good Hope (1796) and St. Helena (1805). Also, "Nautical Remarks and Memoranda of Occurences on Board H.M.S. Polyphemus, Donegal and Nereus between 22 Oct. 1806 and 19 Nov. 1810". With a note on reason and a chart of the Road of Basque. Items marked "Morgan" on paper watermarked 1797 and 1805.

This fonds consists of professional correspondence and some business documents related to Henry Watts & Co, a company that sold land in Alberta to interested people in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. The correspondence includes both external correspondence with clients and internal communication, between employees of Henry Watts & Co as well as employees of Leighton and Gilbert (agents of the Canadian Pacific Irrigation Colonization Company), to whom they were contracted. The internal correspondence includes lists of potential buyers, discussions of plans to recruit more buyers, organizational details for excursions to Alberta to show buyers available land, sales updates, accounting information, changes in legislation that affect the sale of land, and letters documenting hiring. The external correspondence mostly consists of letters from customers seeking information about purchasing land in Canada (especially Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) or who were interested in visiting available land for sale, with responses containing information about available land, upcoming excursions and about farming in Alberta at this time, including recommendations of profitable crops and farming methods.

The fonds is described at the file level, and is not divided into series. Files are arranged in chronological order. The fonds consists of handwritten and typed letters, typed copies of letters, and telegrams. It also includes some legal and financial documents.

This fonds contains documents created by or created for members of the Hall family and their extended family, beginning with Sarah Barker and ending with Charlotte Anne Vennor Lindsay, her great-great-granddaughter. The documents in the fonds represent the personal relationships and activities of Hall family members, as well as some of their business dealings. They date from between 21 January 1719 and approximately 1912, with the majority of the documents representing the period between 1750 and 1890. The documents were created while members of the Hall family and their relations lived in Montreal, Quebec City, and in New England (including Philidelphia, Andover, and Boston). Other documents were created in parts of Ontario (including Kingston, Fort Erie, and York/Toronto) and Germany (Kirchbrak, Durlach).

The fonds is arranged into four series: Diaries, Correspondence, Financial and legal documents, and Other family papers. The Diaries series consists of bound diaries and loose diary entries created by Hall family members. The correspondence series consists primarily of personal correspondence between Hall family members, with some business correspondence and some letters and notes related to genealogy and a financial legacy. The Financial and legal documents series contains a variety of documents related to personal and household expenses, guardianship of minor children, land sale and management, and the execution of wills and distribution of estates. This series includes accounts, receipts and invoices, loans, power of attorney, land surveys, wills, inventories of estates, a marriage contract, and other documents. Finally, the Other family papers series contains documents that did not fit neatly with the other series. These are related to the Hall family's participation in military, religious, and masonic organizations - documented by certificates, official letters, and a religious manuscript - and also includes a recipe.

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.

The fonds documents Swain's career at the Deputy Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, including his role in the standoff at Oka, Quebec, in 1990. One series also consists of research materials collected during the writing of Swain's 2010 books, Oka: A Political Crisis and its Legacy.