Correspondence, memoranda, journals, minutes, speeches, writings, reports, notebooks, scientific research, patents, newsletters, briefings, itineraries, travel reports, lists, staff recollections, biographical material, Seaborg (Seaburg) family papers, genealogical research, printed matter, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, photographs, and other papers documenting Seaborg's work as a nuclear chemist who co-discovered numerous chemical elements, as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and as chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971.

Subjects include Seaborg's 1940 discovery of plutonium and the Nobel Prize he and Edwin M. McMillan won in 1951 for this discovery, his transuranium research at the University of California, Berkeley, controversies surrounding the naming of new transuranium elements including the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry's initial rejection of the name seaborgium for element 106, his work on the atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project, his membership on the first Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee (1947-1950), his years as chancellor of University of California, Berkeley, and its Dept. of Chemistry, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Lawrence Hall of Science, his efforts on behalf of educational reform including work on the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1959 to 1961, his chairmanship of the Chemical Education Material Study, his participation in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, his work at the U.S. Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during World War II, his association with the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, American-Soviet scientific exchange programs from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, intellectual property rights in the nuclear science field, the social, moral, and political implications of nuclear research, United States nuclear policy, nuclear arms control including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, nuclear medicine, nuclear waste disposal, civilian uses of nuclear technology, and the history of nuclear science.

Correspondents include Arthur Holly Compton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vitali I. Gol danski , Leslie R. Groves, Chet Holifield, Lyndon B. Johnson, Frďřic and Irn̈e Joliot-Curie, John F. Kennedy, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Isadore Perlman, Andranik M. Petrosiants, Emilio Segr,̈ Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965), and Harry S. Truman.