John Peabody Harrington's field notes on Native American language, culture, and history are considered one of the richest bodies of work existing in this field. After Harrington’s death in 1961, scholars brought together his papers in the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. After years of effort by teams of archivists, microfilming of the papers began in 1976.

The collection is comprised of field notes, slip-file dictionaries notes and drafts for published writings, photographs, sketches, correspondence, maps, and unpublished grammars and other manuscripts in various stages of completion.  For a description of each section's contents, please click here .

Overall, the collection contains more than 750,000 pages. It includes nine parts:

Part 1: Alaska/Northwest Coast, 1982, 30 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 2: Northern and Central California, 1985, 101 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 3: Southern California/Basin, 1986, 182 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 4: Southwest, 1986, 58 reels (plus paper guide/index

Part 5: Plains, 1987, 17 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 6: Northeast/Southeast, 1987, 18 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 7: Mexico/Central America/South America, 1988, 36 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 8: Notes and Writings on Special Linguistic Studies, 1989, 35 reels (plus paper guide/index)

Part 9: Correspondence and Financial Records, 1991, 17 reels (plus paper guide/index)

This comprehensive and systematically-arranged collection is an essential research tool for anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians performing research in Native American Studies.