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The Biographical Files series documents a more personal side of Rappaport's professional life. It contains his yearly review memos for the University of Michigan, which document his professional achievements and personal involvement with various classes and committees at the university. Also of note are transcripts of three interviews conducted with Rappaport towards the end of his life; the interviewers were Sjoerd Jaarsma of the Netherlands, Janet McIntosh, and Tom Fricke. Correspondence and other materials from a 1997 Society for Applied Anthropology tribute session for Rappaport are included here as well, and help to show the influence he had on his colleagues and former students.

The Correspondence series contains correspondence primarily to and from Rappaport's former students and his colleagues within the Anthropological community. In order to preserve the order of the material as closely as possible to the organizational schemes used by Rappaport, the series has been divided into two subseries: Chronological and Alphabetical. The first subseries has been arranged chronologically by year, and the second has been arranged alphabetically by the individual correspondent's last name. The researcher in search of correspondence between Rappaport and a specific individual should note that it may be necessary to look in both subseries to find the complete record of correspondence. Of particular interest is his correspondence with Derek Freeman, which began shortly after the 1983 publication of Freeman's book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, which challenged Mead's research and conclusions from her fieldwork in Samoa. As a former student and friend of Mead's, Rappaport defended her work both publicly in articles responding to Freeman's challenges, as well as privately in their correspondence. Rappaport's correspondence with his colleagues from the university's Department of Anthropology (such as Ray Kelly, Norma Diamond, and Aram Yengoyan), as well as his correspondence with his former students (like Ellen Messer and Jan Swearingen), are also rich sources of information about both the internal workings of the department and Rappaport's personal and professional life.

The Writings series contains two subseries: Columbia and Articles, Papers, and Books. The Columbia subseries includes writings and related materials from the various classes that Rappaport took at Columbia. Of particular interest is the material from a class he took with Margaret Mead in 1960, "Methods and Problems in Anthropology," as it contains the notes and reports from his first field work experiences. The Articles, Papers, and Books subseries contains correspondence between Rappaport and various publishers, as well as reprints of several of the articles. Overall, this series provides good documentation of Rappaport's changing interests.