This series contains scrapbooks and notebooks created by McGill students, their families, and McGill student organizations between 1870 and 2001.

This series is described at the item level. Student scrapbooks contain photographs, newspaper clippings, and ephemera such as programmes and invitations that document the student’s life and studies while they were at McGill. Student notebooks contain drawings, notes, photographs, and reports created by McGill students as part of their coursework. Scrapbooks and notebooks of McGill student organizations contain schedules, notes, photographs, press clippings, programmes, and sketches related to the organizations’ activities.

These files pertain to meetings which the Council, its representatives and member agencies sponsored or otherwise attended, or, in a few cases, simply considered of sufficient importance to retain a record thereof. Their venue was normally Montreal i if they transpired elsewhere the location and/or auspices is generally indicated in the file title. With surviving records beginning with a 1946 Community Planning Institute (file 877) and ending in a 1973 Notre Dame de Grace Conference on the Quality of Life (file 1041), such gatherings ranged from the comparatively structured format of the annual meeting of the Canadian Welfare Council devoted to the general review of activities, to the more informal regime but focused concerns of seminars, workshops and institutes. Geographically, their settings varied from BaieComeau in the east to Vancouver in the west, and from large metropolitan centres to the Laurentian rusticity of Ste. Adele and L'Esterel. Particularly heavily represented here are Community Funds and Councils of Canada meetings and management staff training seminars, 1968-1971. Important to the development and maintenance of personal contacts in the social welfare field as well as the exchange and up-dating of information, this series features proceedings, reports, briefs and correspondence.

This series contains graphic materials depicting McGill students, staff, and buildings, created between 1857 and 1993. Also includes some photos of views of Montreal.

This series is described at the file level. Graphic materials include photographs, prints of lithographs and engravings, slides, stereoscopic photos, cartes-de visite, architectural drawings, original sketches, and some printing plates and blocks.

This series contains audiovisual material created by McGill University and McGill student societies between 1949 and 2003. Most are recordings of theatrical or musical performances, or university ceremonies such as the awarding of honorary degrees.

This series is described at the item level. Series includes audio diskettes (CDs), vinyl records, and VHS cassettes.

This series contains textiles created by McGill University, McGill students, or McGill student societies between roughly 1907 and 2006. Many items in this series are undated.

This series is described at the item level. Includes T-shirts, textile patches, cardigans, blazers, pillow cases, tobacco silks, neckties, a jacket, a cap, and a banner.

This is the smallest series. Indeed, while a few scattered items in Administrative Records and Committees (for example, files 262, 454, 543, 770 and 858) deal in varying degrees with budgets, grants or other aspects of finance, only twenty-one files, representing the years 1962-1972, comprise the MCSA Financial Records Series in the McGill University Archives. However, Financial Federation and Welfare Federation data for earlier periods, as well as further important documentation of the United Red Feather Services' role, remain in the holdings of Centraide, 493 Sherbrooke Street West. Here can be found financial statements, ledgers, pension records, correspondence, budgets, minutes and related reports which fill in the MCSA picture much more completely.

Nonetheless, the Council Financial Records Series' most complete run of material in the McGill Archives (ten files bearing the title, Budget and United Red Feather Services Budget Committee, each covering a consecutive year, 1962-1971), constitutes a major functional contact between the MCSA and the main source of funding in its last decade. Also of note here are such miscellany as financial statements of the Foster Home Recruiting Centre for 1969 and the Research Department, 1967-1971.

Spanning the years 1920-1972, virtually the whole of the Council's existence, this series reflects the rather casual filing system which characterized much of its administration. It is not a listing of full-fledged member agencies exclusively, i.e., only those accredited to regularly send delegates to MCSA assemblies and other meetings. (Authoritative lists of such institutional members, however, dated 1949, 1966 and 1971 may be found, amongst other locations, in files 1136, 879 and 30 respectively). Rather, Member Organizations· presents records as they pragmatically accumulated in that series in the course of business and inclusion generally means that application for membership was made, though in a few instances not speedily or even ever endorsed by the Admissions Committee or accepted by the required two-thirds vote of the Board of Governors.

But again, the MCSA did not practice a rigid consistency in these matters. For instance, because of suspected irregularities in services and finances, Christian Homes for Children (file 643) never gained Council membership despite its wish to do so, and it indeed appears in Administrative Records rather than Member Organizations. So, too, does the Cecil Butters Memorial Horne (file 644), though it was a member in spirit and the MCSA and Welfare Federation worked on amiable and cooperative terms with the institution; there was, however, perhaps geographical logic in not formalizing its membership in view of the horne's far removed location at Austin, in the Eastern Townships. On the other hand, while the Association of Leisure Time Services was also omitted from printed membership lists, it occupied the same Red Feather Services Building (1040 Atwater Avenue) as the MCSA and operated under Red Feather-MCSA auspices. It is included in the Member Organization Series.

Member Organizations has one of the widest scope and content ranges of any series, with files holding anything from a single document, usually a membership application (for instance, the Eastern Association of Baptist Churches, file 32), to the more than fifty years' association revealed by the Montreal Diet Dispensary (file 85). Yet, while the Travellers' Aid Society covers something less than half the chronology of the Diet Dispensary, its six files provide one of the fullest looks at the actual-day-to-day operations of any member in the series. In general, a high proportion of Member Organizations not only feature such related basics as their constitutions, letters patent, by-laws and initial annual reports with financial statements (required to be submitted with applications to the Council); but also correspondence, MCSA special committee reports on the agency or its field of endeavour, and relevant newsletters, brochures or pamphlets. Some also provide copies of their own submissions to government, or Federation and Red Feather Budget Committees.

This series contains artifacts created by McGill University or created by commercial manufacturers for McGill between roughly 1800 and 2015. Many items in this series are undated.

This series is described at the item level. Includes medals, pins, tobacco tins and humidors, trophies, bottles and mugs, commemorative spoons, matchbooks, and other objects.

While MCSA documents earlier sometimes construed the term "project" so generally as to encompass virtually any activity in the social welfare field (see, for example, the statement on the Council Program, 1941-1954: file 206), no identifiable Projects and Task Forces Series existed until the 1956 New Areas Recreation Project relocation of the old inner city Iverley Community Centre to the rapidly growing post-war suburb of St. Laurent (files 816 and 1192) . This series, which proliferated in the 1960s, is the most socially activist and even politically radical in the implications of the programmes some of its documents promote. It is also the most ambiguous to the extent that, because of the vagaries of the MCSA's filing practices and assignment of titles, in some cases it is unclear as to precisely what project (though not which task force) a given file pertains.

The largest series, Projects and Task Forces in general reflects a change in mood from the comparative conservatism of the 1950s and, while still providing traditional services like research, deals more concertedly in consumer and tenant advocacy, and self-help and Dhands on D community involvement, including the encouragement of citizens' and other pressure groups. Moreover, though the participation of the Council and its members in and with other organizations had always been a matter of course, in Projects and Task Forces this involvement, especially in the last half decade or so of the institution's existence, sometimes took the form of the MCSA role and identity becoming submerged, almost marginal. In important fields like housing and urban redevelopment, and the coordination of efforts to alleviate and eliminate poverty, the Council would seem to have been losing the initiative and becoming just another player on a wider, and increasingly francophone, welfare team.

Correspondence, briefs, reports, minutes, press clippings and press releases, as well as lists of supporters and mailing lists, are all well represented, but this is the only series to preserve public petitions (these are found in four of the Lower Bus Fares for Senior Citizens files). A substantial portion of the holdings are committees which might otherwise be expected to appear mostly or totally in the Committees Series. However, their original Council inclusion in Projects and Task Forces has been maintained. Noteworthy in this respect are the Committees on Quebec Social Assistance, Housing and Urban Renewal, Greater Montreal Anti-Poverty Coordinating, Pointe St. Charles Coordinating, and Safe Label ... Safe Closure.

The provision of day care for the children of working parents, with -Day Care- appearing in 84 titles as listed, constitutes the largest concentration of data on any subject in this series. But other themes are also numerously addressed.