The papers include: material on Professor Meitner's many honours; diaries; notebooks, including laboratory notebooks, scientific memoranda, calculations and lecture notes; offprints of articles; correspondence, including general and miscellaneous correspondence and correspondence with family and colleagues; material on the Nobel Prize, mainly recommendations and descriptions of work by candidates; birthday greetings; photographs; personal papers, including school reports, official documents and accounts; family correspondence; articles, mainly about Professor Meitner (unfortunately when she fled from Germany in 1938, she had to leave the drafts of her own articles before 1939); film and recordings, including interviews about Professor Meitner, and recordings made by Meitner herself.

The language of most of the papers is, of course, German and before 1945 the old (Gothic) script predominates. After 1938, there are increasing numbers of letters in Swedish. Professor Meitner wrote quite well in both English and Swedish, but preferred to use German if her correspondent was fluent in that language. For a short period, Professor Meitner made use of an elaborate series of abbreviations for her drafts. Some of these can be found in MTNR 9/18.