Collections by Type
- Personal papers of individual leaders in the social work and social reform fields reflect their job responsibilities, their professional affiliations and relationships, and in some cases their personal and family affairs.
- Records of Planning and coordination organizations -- many of them national umbrella organizations that supported the work of local affiliated agencies, and some of them confined to a particular state or city -- generally reflect efforts to study conditions, define problems, set standards for service, coordinate activities, allocate resources, and support the activities of agencies that provide direct services to clients.
- Records of Service-provider agencies are more likely to include an intimate picture of local conditions or of the lives of individuals served. Most of the agencies served specific cities (particularly New York and Minneapolis-St. Paul), but several service organizations are national in scope.
- Records of professional organizations such as the National Association of Social Workers tend to focus primarily on issues related to the social work profession.
- Records of consumer-centered groups provide the perspective of self-help groups or of clients.
- Projects records reflect research, training, or demonstration projects, usually aimed at studying or improving service to a particular clientele.
- Records of Publishers reflect the perspective afforded by efforts to report on and analyze social service and social reform.
- A limited number of oral history collections preserve the efforts of several researchers to create a record of participants' recollections of events.