As s student of Edward Sapir at the University of Chicago, Fanggui (Fang-Kuei) Li spent two months during the summer of 1928 in northern Alberta studying Chipewyan and went on to a career that included pioneering work in other Dene ("Athapascan") languages (including Mattole, Hupa, and Wailaki), Thai, and Chinese. A longtime member of the Academia Sinica, Li was for many years a professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington and, at the end of his career, at the University of Hawaii. The Li Collection is comprised of ten volumes containing stories in Denesuline ("Chipewyan") collected in northern Alberta in 1928 by the Chinese-American linguist, Fanggui Li, along with an extensive Denesuline slip file. The texts contain phonetic transcriptions of stories elicited from François Mandeville and Baptiste Ferrier with interlinear English translations. These were edited and published Fanggui as Li and Ronald Scollon, Chipewyan Texts (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1976). The collection also includes two cassettes containing an oral history interview with Li conducted in November 1982 by M. Terry Thompson and Laurence Thompson.

Collection of research notes by Ilse Lehiste, mostly relating to phonetics. The collection includes over 200 audio recordings (mostly reel-to-reel tapes, and a small amount of cassettes and commercial Estonian vinyl records), many spectrograms (rolled and flat), research notes towards publications, other lab notes, and correspondence and other professional files. This collection is not yet processed. Languages within the collection include Estonian, Finnish, Baltic languages, Icelandic, Russian, Cree, Siksika, and Denesuline (Chipewyan).

Frank Siebert (1913-1998) is one of the key contributors to the field of Algonquian linguistics. While he did not pursue a degree in linguistics or anthropology, he independently acquired the skills and knowledge of a professional scholar. His work on Penobscot is some of the best and most comprehensive in existence. The Siebert Papers document the interest and work of Frank Siebert in the linguistics of the Algonquian family of languages, particularly Penobscot. The collection includes correspondence, research notes, drafts and published manuscripts by Siebert, as well as secondary sources consulted by Siebert. To a lesser extent, it contains material that documents Siebert's personal life, his interest in book collecting and his career as a physician.

Trained as an anthropologist at Berkeley under A.L. Kroeber and Robert Lowie, Carl Voegelin spent the majority of his career as a structural linguist specializing in Algonquian languages, including Delaware, Potawatomi, Fox, Menominee, and Shawnee, and on the Seneca, Ojibwa (Chippewa), and Blackfoot (Siksika). His most significant contributions came through his studies of Delaware, Shawnee, and Hopi, but he is also credited with reviving the International Journal of American Linguistics after the death of its founder, Franz Boas, and with nurturing the program in anthropology at Indiana University, where he was on faculty from 1941 until his retirement in 1976. The Voegelin collection contains field notes, lexical files, notebooks, papers, correspondence, and other materials relating to Voegelin's work on Native American languages. The bulk of the collection concerns Delaware and Shawnee, but there is significant material for Blackfoot, Menominee, Ojibwa and Potawatomi, Seneca, and Penobscot. Notes on Turkish, kept during the Second World War, are also present. Among other important series in the collection are Voegelin's correspondence and notes concerning two of his major projects: the translation and interpretation of the Walam Olam and his study of Shawnee law. Correspondents include Leonard Bloomfield, Eli Lilly, and Morris Swadesh. A portion of the collection is indexed in Kendall (1982).

The Mary Rosamond Haas papers are extensive, including correspondence, research notes, field notes, texts, lexical slip files, audio recordings, photographs, reprints and more, covering more than 100 languages of North America and Southeast Asia. Of particular value are notes and audio recordings from fieldwork from the 1930s on Ditidaht, Tunica, Natchez and Muscogee, work toward pedagogical materials for Thai, and groundbreaking comparative studies of several language families of North America.

For many years referred to as the "Franz Boas Collection of American Indian Linguistics," this collection consists of a large body of linguistic and ethnographic material gathered together by Boas and many of his colleagues and students primarily from the 1890s to the 1940s. It contains the bulk of Boas's own fieldwork material, with the main exception of most of his Inuit and earliest Northwest Coast fieldwork. It contains the majority of the work sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, which was directed by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and other academic linguists from 1927-1937. The collection, however, also contains related kinds of fieldwork and derived secondary materials created outside the auspices of this Committee, both earlier and later. The first deposit of the material arrivied in 1945. Subsequently, additional related materials were donated and added, as noted in the listings. Additionally, the documentary materials produced by some of the early projects (1945 to circa 1955) of the APS Phillips Fund for Native American Research were added to this collection. The collection has grown to over 80 linear feet of material representing at least 166 languages and dialects from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The formats range from field notes and ethnographic texts to slip files, vocabularies, lexica, and grammars, and dozens of linguists and Native consultants are represented.