This collection includes correspondence, notebooks, reports, and recordings. The twenty-eight volumes of notebooks, which are his daily record of calculations, meetings attended and conversations held about his work, are of primary significance. They cover physics, nucleonics, quantum electrodynamics, and relativity.

The correspondence contains many personal evaluations of scientists (subject to restrictions on use), as well as Wheeler's contributions to promoting physics and scientific education and training in general.

There are important series relating to his participation in the 1950s on the Committee on Scientific and Technical Personnel of NATO (headed by Senator Henry M. Jackson) and to his organizational work on the Joint Committee of the American Physical Society and the American Philosophical Society on the History of Theoretical Physics in the Twentieth Century. There are also two boxes of council and committee records (1964-1966) of the American Physical Society.