The Dean's Files: Henry F. Vaughan, 1941-1967 (primarily 1941-1959), comprise the is divided into five subseries: Annual Reports, Committees, Correspondence, Faculty Correspondence, and Topical Files. Portions of the dean's files have been significantly rearranged in processing the collection. Among the least disturbed from the original order are the Annual Reports and Committees subseries. The annual reports, 1944-1959, are sometimes duplicates of those printed in the President's Annual Report, but they often include more detailed reports of departmental and faculty activities. The Committees subseries, 1941-1967, consists of individual files of minutes for various school and departmental committees. Most of these files are very incomplete; the collection has only limited runs of executive committee and faculty minutes, for example.
The Correspondence, Faculty Correspondence, and Topical Files subseries represent a substantial rearrangement of the filing system used by the dean's office. In the original office organizing scheme all materials in these three subseries were in one alphabetical subseries filed geographically by origin or destination of the letter or memorandum. For example, correspondence relating to the planning and construction of the school's building was filed under "Battle Creek" because the architect was located there. Because this filing system hardly seemed intuitive for researchers, a new arrangement has been created breaking what had formerly been a single run of correspondence into three subseries: Correspondence, Faculty Correspondence, and Topical Files.
The first two subseries can be seen as paired; one (Correspondence) dealing primarily with developments in public health outside the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and the other (Faculty Correspondence) dealing mostly with the internal workings of the school.