Collection contains the papers of Alberta Arthurs, a consultant in the cultural and philanthropy fields and a former Director of the Arts and Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation. Most of the papers regard Arthurs' career in philanthropy from when she departed the Rockefeller Foundation in 1996 to about 2006. Papers, speeches, drafts, notes, proposals, research materials, correspondence, photographs, and conference materials provide evidence of the various projects Arthurs managed and supported during this time period. Some of the key focuses of these initiatives and studies include the relationship between nonprofit and for-profit organizations within the arts field, cultural policy, cultural diplomacy, the relationship between culture and development, the role of emerging technologies within the arts, communication and convening in the arts field, and convening for cultural policy.

Arthurs did much of her consulting through MEM Associates during the time that the collection materials document, and through her consulting assignments, board memberships, and other professional activities, she worked on projects with organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Arts and Culture, the American Assembly, the Salzburg Seminar, UNESCO's International Fund for the Promotion of Culture (IFPC), Pew Charitable Trusts, the StreamingCulture program at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA), and the James Irvine Foundation among many others. The collection also contains records that Arthurs created through her position as Director of the Project on Culture and Development at the Council on Foreign Relations as well as records that show her participation at the White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy in November 2000.

Some files within the collection do hold materials that originate from when Arthurs headed the Arts and Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation. These records consist of a few speeches, papers, and grant project descriptions. Personal correspondence and photographs were also produced during Arthurs' tenure at the Foundation. Her and her husband Edward Arthurs' later work with the resident scholars and artists program at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center in the early 2000s is documented by notes, a report that they wrote about the program, and letters from different resident scholars and artists.

The processes that the records' creator employed for filing and using the collection files created three different groupings of material: 1) files organized around specific projects and subjects; 2) files marked current and personal; and 3) file marked miscellaneous. The distinctions in file organization between these sets of records are represented in the collection's three series.