The series consists of files relating to Irene Spry's research and scholarship (generally outside of her publications) and is organized into six blocks: hydro-electric power research files, Harold Adams Innis material, research correspondence, files on organizations that she belonged to or supported, book reviews and scholarly criticism, and annotated books. The hydro material includes draft chapters of her uncompleted PhD thesis on water power in Canada, research material, travel diaries for her field research in northern Ontario, and correspondence relating to her field research in the Northwest Territories. The latter files show some of the difficulties faced by women doing research in the academic world. The research correspondence holds economic correspondence with George Cadbury, O. J. Firestone, John Crow, Tillo Kuhn, and Joan Robinson; fur trade history correspondence with A. J. Ray, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Jennifer Brown; and institutional correspondence with various archives, libraries and museums.
The Harold Innis material documents her relationship with this noted scholar and her role later in life as an interpreter of his work. There are letters from Innis and his wife, Mary Quayle Innis, and from Donald Creighton regarding his biography of Innis. In addition, it includes offprints of his work inscribed to Irene Spry, her papers and articles about him, and files pertaining to the Harold Innis Foundation. The organizations block holds files for the Canadian Broadcasting League, Champlain Society, Committee for an Independent Canada, Friends of the London School of Economics, Institute for Research on Environment and Economy, the Royal Geographical Society, and other academic associations or activist groups. In addition, the series contains files for her book reviews for the "American Economic Review", "Journal of Political Economy", "The Economist", and the "Canadian Journal of Political Science", from the 1930s to the 1960s, and files of her reviews of books relating to western Canadian and fur trade history from the 1970s and 1980s. The final block of records consists of books relating to economics or Canadian history containing extensive annotations by Irene Spry.
