Correspondence, memoranda, minutes of meetings, reports, calendars and schedules, speeches and writings, background and research material, family and estate papers, financial and legal documents, interviews, notes, course outlines and examinations, passports and travel documents, invitations, certificates, programs, scrapbooks, printed matter, photographs, and other papers documenting Boorstin's career as a professor of history at the University of Chicago, as director and senior historian of the National Museum of History and Technology, as the Librarian of Congress, and as the author of numerous works on American history and civilization and legal history. Includes material on the establishment of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, Boorstin's efforts to promote public interest in reading, and his association with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Japan-United States Friendship Commission, Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Correspondents include Howard H. Baker, Jacques Barzun, Silvio A. Bedini, Edward L. Bernays, Warren E. Burger, Henry Steele Commager, Marcus Cunliffe, Maurice English, Abe Fortas, John Hope Franklin, Oscar Handlin, Helen Hayes, Richard Hofstadter, Hubert H. Humphrey, Henry Kissinger, Louis L'Amour, Dumas Malone, Peter C. Marzio, F.O. Matthiessen, Edmund Morris, Daniel P. Moynihan, Lewis F. Powell, Ronald Reagan, David Riesman, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, C. Vann Woodward, and Herman Wouk.

Family papers consist primarily of correspondence and other papers relating to Boorstin, his wife, Ruth Frankel Boorstin, who edited or coauthored some of his works, and their sons, and his father, Samuel Boorstin.