The Harold Spence-Sales fonds at McGill’s Canadian Architecture Collection primarily contains project records related to Harold Spence-Sales' career as an architect and urban planner. The bulk of the records pertain to projects that Harold Spence-Sales worked on as well as corresponding financial, administrative and office records.

The fond heavily documents projects that Harold Spence-Sales worked on during the 1970s-1980s in British Columbia and in Quebec during the 1940s-1960s. Other projects that Harold Spence-Sales worked on across Canada and internationally appear intermittently throughout the fonds. The Oromocto community planning project that Harold Spence-Sales worked on from 1955-1958 in New Brunswick is particularly well documented. Harold Spence-Sales designed Oromocto to be a military town. Before He transformed Oromocto into a military town it was a defunct 19th century shipbuilding town. The Oromocto project is considered one of Harold Spence-Sales most important urban-town planning projects.

Apart from administrative, office and project records, the fonds also contains records that relate to Harold Spence-Sales professional activities outside of his work as an architect and urban planner. For example, awards and honors that he received and records related to his involvement in architectural and urban planning associations. Additional professional activities include: his involvement in creating exhibitions, curating architectural-themed magazines and periodicals as well as copies of publications that he worked on solo and in collaboration with John Bland.

The fonds also contains fourteen boxes of Harold Spence-Sales personal records. The personal records primarily cover Harold Spence-Sales interest in art, creative pursuits, family activities, family genealogy, personal finances, last will and testaments as well as his decline in health and his death. Within the fourteen boxes that have been cataloged as personal records, there are also materials related to Harold Spence-Sales professional activities. For example, awards that Harold Spence-Sales received and records related to exhibitions and artistic projects that he worked on.

The fonds consists of textual records and artifacts related to surgeon and researcher Dr. Charles R. Drew. It contains letters, artifacts, and a yearbook from Drew's time as a student at McGill University, including his notable achievements as a student athlete. These items include medals, a track meet program, an athletic shirt, and a yearbook. The fonds also contains invitations, pamphlets, and other ephemera related to tributes and honors awarded to Drew, including printed testimonials and materials associated with schools, lectures, and institutions named after him, such as the Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School. These tributes and honors primarily recognize his contributions to medical science, but also encompass the program from his induction into the McGill Athletics Hall of Fame. Two letters in the fonds addressed to Drew's sister and his wife reflect on his accomplishments and include reminiscences from friends. Additionally, the fonds comprises five reprints of articles authored by Drew and two items concerning his career at Howard University and the Freedman's Hospital, including an outline for gathering a patient's medical history.

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.

This includes notes on a dictionary of Chinook Jargon (Chinook Wawa) extracted from a report of H-L. Langevin and a Frisian dictionary and grammar. There is also a volume of marriage certificates 1878-1880.

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."