On their arrival at the archives, the papers of Wilfred Brown were found to be in considerable disarray, so that it was difficult to establish their original order. The majority of the material was in the form of loose papers, which appeared never to have been placed in any sort of filing system. Some appeared to fall into natural groupings, for example of papers relating to work done for a particular body or correspondence of a similar date, but for the most part they were without any signs of original order. There were also a number of original files, with or without titles. Of these, a small number proved to contain material relating to several major aspects of Wilfred Brown's career, without any discernible links within the file. In consideration of the general lack of order within the collection, which suggests that these items may not have been deliberately filed together, it has been considered to be more useful to the reader to split these files and place their contents with the loose papers to which they are related. However, all other files have been kept intact and the order within them has not been disturbed. Where they had a title, this has been preserved and is indicated by the use of quotation marks; all Wilfred Brown's original files are noted as such in their catalogue entry. After appraisal, the whole collection was sorted into four series: biographical and personal material, correspondence, work and publications. Loose material was sorted into files, and within the series files were arranged alphabetically and chronologically, where appropriate.