The Cam Papers consists of uncatalogued printed ephemera relating to the University and its societies, and the City of Cambridge. These include leaflets, posters, notices, programmes and newspaper cuttings. Anything which may be more properly regarded as a pamphlet has been placed in the class Cam and entered in the catalogue.

The Cam Papers currently include material from over 1300 different student societies and groups.

Official papers issued by the University or its officers between 1818 and 1870 form the basis of the collection (although the earliest item dates back to 1643). It was then the custom to distribute all official notices and announcements printed on single sheets of paper, and it is due to the foresight of half a dozen members of the University who preserved those loose sheets and gave their collections to the Library that we possess an almost complete series.

In 1870 it was decided to compose these official notices into a weekly gazette, the Cambridge University Reporter, and thereafter the need to preserve individual sheets ceased. As the number of official papers coming into the collection falls around this time, the extent of miscellaneous material increases. Notices of societies, meetings, lectures, dinners; programmes of theatrical and musical events; this ephemeral printed evidence of Cambridge's social, intellectual and cultural life appears in Cam Papers in ever-increasing volume.