The sources of the foundation collections of the physical archive lie in the activities of a number of public campaigning organisations active during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In most cases, these bodies of archival material remained in the care of participants in the campaigns, whose activities had some common themes and who consequently remained in communication with each other. The fact that these collections had in general some common strong points was judged by those holding them to justify their aggregation into the present specialist archive.

This rationale of the archive is clearly seen in the list of its component collections, which contains short descriptions, and reinforced by an outline of their general strong points.

It is on the basis of this common character of the collections that the principles for the selection of new additions are applied.