This series consists of electrostatic copies of documents obtained and collected by the World Bank History Project staff in the course of researching and writing The World Bank: Its First Half Century. The documents relate primarily to the topics of the chapters in Volume I; a few are the background to the research papers prepared by the project's research assistants. The authors filed the copies by subject, sometimes with cryptic subject titles. Some files may have been kept by an individual staff member,but those files have been combined in this general reference series.

The majority of the documents copied in these files are in the archives of the Bank, but some are also copies received from former Bank staff or from non-Bank sources.