Audio tape recordings, video recordings, unpublished film footage, and 33 and 78 rpm disks. The recordings are primarily first hand retrospective accounts by physicists, given in talks at meetings of physics societies, departmental colloquia, retirements, radio broadcasts, public lectures, etc. The unpublished film footage (8 mm and 16 mm) is mostly of gatherings of physicists and astronomers at universities (e.g. the Summer Symposia at the University of Michigan in the 1930s) and at conferences in the United States and Europe in the post-World War II period; the collection also includes some films of talks by individual physicists, of an autobiographical nature. Topics cover a full range of physics and allied sciences such as nuclear physics, solid state physics, high energy physics, optics, acoustics, crystallography, astronomy, astrophysics, geophysics, science education, research facilities, and physical instruments.

Contributors include American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, John Bardeen, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Walter Brattain, David Bromley, Horace Crane, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Samuel Goudsmit, Otto Hahn, E. Loenard Jossem, Werner Oppenheimer, Isidor Rabi, Ernest Rutherford, Ralph Sawyer, Glenn Seaborg, Emilio Segr,̌ Bengt Stromgren, Charles Townes, John Van Vleck, Charles Weiner, Victor Weisskopf, John Wheeler, Eugene Wigner and others.