Margery Perham kept voluminous notes of her reading, the lectures and seminars she gave and attended, of official papers studied on her travels, of interviews with members of the Colonial Service, politicians, and academics, of newspaper articles and broadcasts, and of any material studied when preparing her own lectures, broadcast scripts, books, and articles for newspapers and journals. Her research assistants also contributed to notes compiled for projected books on several regions of Africa. Many of these notes can be found in her series of 166 notebooks and files of loose leaves formerly held in ring-binders. These have been numbered 60-225, in sequence with the boxes holding the remainder of the collection. Numbers in brackets at the end of the descriptions, e.g. (N1C), were those used to identify the positions of the notebooks on shelves in Margery Perham's study; they have been included merely as an example of the code used by Patience Empson, and are no longer of any practical use. The notebooks have now been arranged according to the subject or territory concerned in a roughly chronological order, although Margery Perham tended to add to some of these notebooks many years after they were first compiled.