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The focal point of this collection of sheet music is the First World War. These songs do not reflect the idea of war as it is commonly thought of in popular imagination: battlefields, trenches and heroic charges. These songs were not, for the most part, written for the soldiers. Instead, they reflect the daily experience of the Canadians who remained at home during the war and the way people thought about the effect the war was having on their lives and on their country. They do not address changes in society explicitly; instead they go deeper, preserving the visceral responses of Canadians to the war as it was happening. This sheet music offers an intimate picture of the conditions out of which post-war Canada grew.

The fonds contains poem manuscripts and a single letter. The identity of Mrs. Russell, to whom the single letter in this collection was written and for whom the poems, addressed to "Lydia", were presumably composed, is unknown.

The collection consists of correspondence, photographs, post cards, maps, manuscripts, typescripts, orders and other official documents, diagrams, programmes, souvenirs, song-sheets, artwork, leaflets, sound recordings and moving images, and printed materials.

The collection consists of posters issued by the following British organizations: Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London; Parliamentary War Savings Committee; National War Savings Committee; Joint Labour Recruiting Committee; Ministry of National Service; Navy; Imperial Maritime League; City of London; and Blue Cross fund. The collection also contains posters issued by the governments of Canada (includes Canadian Victory Bonds), France, United States and Germany. There are a large number of posters from Louvain, Belgium. There are also several posters issued by the German occupying forces in France and Belgium and the British occupying forces in Germany.

Realia and ephemera related to the First World War.

The collection consists of trench maps and aerial photographs created during the First World War. The majority of the maps were created by the British Ordnance Survey for the Allied forces, although a few German, French and other maps purchased privately by officers exist within the collection. As the collection is almost exclusively made up of British mapping, coverage is limited to the British sector of the Western Front extending from the English Channel in the north to the vicinity of Reims in the south.

The aerial photographs were produced by the [British] Royal Flying Corps (renamed Royal Air Force when it merged with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1918). However, a few French and German examples exist within the collection. Approximately 350 photographs in the collection have hand annotations ranging from simple circles indicating the location of important features on the recto to full, textual descriptions on the verso. Approximately 90 additional photographs are mounted in an Album acquired from the University of Alberta.