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.

A student of Edward Sapir's at the University of Chicago (PhD, 1931), Harry Hoijer began his career in linguistics with intensive fieldwork on the Coahuiltecan language, Tonkawa, though shortly thereafter he turned to an intensive study of Athapaskan, including several Apache languages, Navajo, Sarsi (Tsuut'ina), and Galice. Employed as an instructor at the University of Chicago for several years, Hoijer moved to the new Department of Anthropology at UCLA in 1940, where he remained until his retirement. The Hoijer Collection contains textual materials representing comparative linguistic studies of Athapascan languages, including Dakelh ("Carrier"), Dënesųłiné ("Chipewyan"), Galice, Navajo, Tsuut'ina ("Sarsi"), and five Apache languages and dialects, (Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Mescalero, Lipan, and San Carlos). The collection also includes four audio recordings of Gwich'in ("Loucheux"), and copies of texts collected by Hoijer from colleagues Berard Haile, Diamond Jenness, David Mandelbaum, Chic Sandoval, and Edward Sapir.

The linguist Harvey Pitkin has worked on several of the indigenous languages of Northern California, with a particular interest in Wintu, Patwin, and Yuki. A student of A. L. Kroeber, Pitkin was a member of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at Columbia University before his retirement in the late 1980s. The Pitkin Papers contain materials recorded or accumuluted by Harvey Pitkin during the course of his study of American Indian languages, including not only his own fieldnotes and research on Wintu and Yuki, but originals and copies of notes, notebooks, and slipfiles by A. L. Kroeber, A. M. Halpern, John P. Harrington, John Alden Mason, Paul Radin, Hans Uldall, Donald Ultan, T. T. Waterman, and others. These include important information on Atsugewi, Kwakiutl, Luiseno, Pomo, Wappo, Yahi, and Yana, and include some data on the consultants Ralph Moore (Yuki) and Ishi (Yahi).

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.