The Phillips Fund Collection contains material submitted to the American Philosophical Society by grantees of the Phillips Fund for Native American Research. The subdisciplines represented and the subject matter are highly varied, but include project reports, dissertations, published and unpublished papers, dictionaries and vocabularies, field notes, and audiovisual materials.

While no systematic effort was made to gather the results of early Phillips grants, several grantees, including Zellig Harris, sent sound recordings, notes, or other works anyway. In most cases, these were incorporated into the American Council of Learned Society's Committee on Native American Languages Collection (also known as the Franz Boas Linguistic Collection).

Native American Images note : Over 400 black and white silver gelatin photographs, color photographs, color slides, color VHS video, photocopy prints, and ink sketches of eleven different Native American tribes contained in thirteen grantee reports from 1964-1995. Arranged alphabetically by contributor, the images reflect Seneca political charts (Abler); Mayan street festivals (Adams); early Minnesota Dakota settlements (Bray); old Oraibi Hopi pueblo (Cameron); murals of Oklahoma tribes (Carlisle); Taino island scenes (Forbes); Navajo mountain community (Hammond); Conquest of Itza (Hellmuth); Hopi pottery (Kealiinohomoku); Stockbridge-Munsee community (Mochon); Dakota Pine Ridge reservation (Powers); Mixtec picture-writing (Troike); Seneca dwellings (Wyler). Of note, the Oklahoma post office murals of Seminoles, Kiowa, and Chickasaws were painted by Native American artists from 1939-1943. Also of note, the Bray video details cartographer Joseph Nicollet 1836-1840 expedition to the Upper Mississippi River. Most of the grants are referenced in Freeman’s Guide to manuscripts relating to the American Indian. The slides by Powers are housed in the Photograph Collection; the photographs by Mochon are in the Speck Collection (572.97 Sp3, Box 10, folders 22-23). All other images are housed with their corresponding textual reports.