Fonds consists of 947 letters, bills of exchange, and telegrams sent from Victoria-area merchants to Royal Fisk, a forwarding and shipping agent in San Francisco, during the Cariboo Gold Rush. Letters provide insight into the effect of the Cariboo Gold Rush on trade and commerce in Victoria at the time. Topics covered in the letters include ordering goods; remitting cash, gold and drafts; advising of market prices; conditions in the mines of Victoria and Puget Sound; providing news of latest gold discoveries, shipping activity, finances, and mergers or dissolutions; business alliances; establishing express services; arrival of the first telegraph; et al.

This collection consists of materials related to early British Columbia history in the years when BC was still a British colony, prior to joining Canada in 1871. The collection consists of colonial government documents (proclamations, messages, acts, and rules and regulations) effecting the daily life of British Columbians. These include real estate titles, road works, railways, local, legal and financial matters, labour, and infrastructure. The collection includes proclamations by James Douglas, who was the first governor of BC and served from 1858-1864.

The collection consists of five letters (1863-1871); a diary belonging to Charles O. Eaton of Boston; a list of clothing and other garrison camp equipment of Lt. William McKinley, Jr.; two broadsides; a printed report of a meeting of the citizens of Bobb County, Georgia (1860); a publication of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society; a lock of Mrs. Robert E. Lee's hair and an engraving of General Ulysses S. Grant and family.

The Penkill collection consists of records of William Bell Scott, Alice Boyd and Margaret Courtenay. The collection includes five hundred letters from Scott to Alice Boyd, and a large number of letters to Scott and Boyd from other artists and writers. Also in the collection are the letters from Arthur Hughes and letters concerning the 1872 illness of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The collection also includes the diaries of W.B. Scott, Alice Boyd and Margaret Courtenay.

The collection consists of photography of every aspect of World War I - from cadet training to soldiers' graves. Every theatre of war is represented, but the majority of prints were taken in Europe, particularly on the battlefields of France and Belgium. In Britain, there are prints of Gibson Girls welding ships or carting coal. There are prints of royalty and military commanders, including Greek, Belgian and Japanese aristocracy. The technology of war is illustrated in the numerous prints of planes, ships, tanks and guns of all kinds. The collection is strong in portraying the average "Tommy" and his role in the war.

Collection consists of 38 examples of decorative luggage labels from hotels in various locales, including British Columbia, Asian and European cities.

The fonds consists of an album created by former UBC student Arthur Evan Boss. It contains over 560 small black and white photographs, of which approximately the first half relate to UBC and taken between 1917 and 1924. The 232 UBC images include many views of students and student life at the original Fairview campus. As well as posed individual shots of students, there are many photographs of various student activities, including the annual class picnic. Although there is limited duplication of images already in the Archives, the photographs are, for the most part, unique, and a large majority of them have captions with enough information for identifying individuals. Images in the second half of the album lack detailed description and do not appear to relate to UBC.

The fonds consists of 1,398 glass plate negatives, glass lantern slides, celluloid prints and celluloid negatives, the majority of which were taken by Lilian Bland. The photographs reflect the varied and unique life of Lilian Bland and her family. The fonds includes several photographs of the Mayfly, the bi-plane Lilian famously designed, constructed, and flew. Other photographic subjects include horse-riding and horse-racing, Lilian's fathers' artwork, her husbands' travels in China, family photographs, birds and bird-watching, her travels in Europe, California, and British Columbia, and photographs documenting her years spent as a settler living on the Quatsino Sound in Vancouver Island and in California with her family.
Other record types in the fonds include Lilian Bland’s unpublished memoir, and the original enclosures for the photographs including boxes, envelopes, and box lists.
The finding aid for the fonds, attached as a PDF, includes a spreadsheet of images as they were received upon donation to Rare Books and Special Collections. A brief description created by the donor is available for each image in the finding aid.

The collection consists of ninety-one albums of postcards and photographs pertaining to views and scenes mainly in British Columbia, but also including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Yukon as well as Europe. The views of British Columbia include views of the Rocky Mountains, Vancouver, Victoria, Mayne Island, and Buttle Lake (pre-1911) as well as those of logging (Capilano Timber Co., 1917-1920), mining (Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Co. and Consolidated Cariboo Hydraulic Mining Co.) railways (Canadian Pacific Railway, Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, and Great Northern Railway) and shipping. In addition, there are postcards and photographs of the Hudson's Bay Company Kamchatka Venture, 1921, U.S. Civil War portraits and New Zealand shipping.

The collection consists of minutes of the Fraser River Canners' Association (1900-1909) and the British Columbia Canners' Association (1909-1923) and records from their members' canneries: Acme, Albion, Atlas, Colonial, Celtic, Dinsmore, Great West, Imperial, Pacific Coast, Terra Nova, and Vancouver. The collection also includes 25 scrapbooks of clippings (1900-1923) and photograph albums.