The Camden Technical Library files series represent a selection from the contents of the former RCA technical library located on the sixth floor of Building 10 of the Camden Plant assembled with the cooperation of company historian Frederick O. Barnum III. The materials are organized into four subseries: Technical reports; Engineering notebooks; Standards; and Publications and manuals.

Following RCA's original practice, all of the technical reports in this subseries have been cataloged individually on Hagley's OPAC and may be accessed by author, title and subject or free-text searches. If you know the serial number of a report, you may locate it using a "keyword" search by placing the number within quotation marks, e.g. "PTR-2". Likewise, you may use "keyword" searching for the name or location of an individual laboratory, department or division or any other significant phrase. The report runs generally end in 1969-1975 and are not complete.

The reports collected in the Camden library were generated by work in many RCA laboratories on a wide array of commercial and military subjects. Some report series are the work of a single facility, while other collect the work from many different facilities. The bulk of the reports were generated at Princeton and Camden, but the Camden library collected copies from most of the other research facilities in the system. Reports generated in the Camden Plant come from both the Commercial and Aerospace & Defense Groups. The former deal with research in radio, black and white and color television, sound recording, the "Photophone" system of motion picture sound tracks, "Electrofax", and computers, Many of the reports deal with basic research into electronic components and the materials used therein, from vacuum tubes to solid state and superconductors​. The Aerospace & Defense reports deal with radar, sonar, air traffic control, surveillance systems, communications, weather and spy satellites, ICBM's, military communications systems, hardware for the lunar and Mars missions, and designs for space stations and space vehicles.

All of the reports are highly technical in nature with heavy use of equations, graphs, and diagrams. Most cannot be read without a background in electronics engineering. The exceptions are a sizeable number of reports generated by trips to European laboratories and RCA's European licensees which discuss the state of research in electronics and computers, the development of television broadcasting, and the growth of markets for consumer electronics. RCA engineers kept abreast of developments at most of the major manufacturers and research institutes in Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and some contacts with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Most of the reports are highly focused on very narrow problems, or very specific properties of materials and parts of larger devices. Thus it would be necessary to peruse a large number of the reports to get a sense of the larger directions in RCA's research or understand which experiments were commercially successful. Only a small minority of the reports describe the functioning of large pieces of apparatus that a non-specialist would recognize or the state of research on a broad topic.

The engineering notebooks comprise volumes issued to engineers of the RCA Manufacturing Company, Inc. and, after 1942, the RCA Victor Division of RCA. The notebooks contain a log of work done with sketches of apparatus.

The Standards subseries is further organized into six sub-subseries of standards consist of looseleaf binders with printed company, industry and government standards governing the dimension, composition and manufacture of electronic components and materials, along with written specifications or instructions and graphs showing performance characteristics​. The Master Items list all the parts of a particular assembly with drawings, if appropriate. The Manufacturing Guides outline procedures to be followed in the manufacture of components and materials. The Test Report Index refers to microfilmed reports that are not part of this accession.

The Publications and manuals is futher organized into six sub-subseries of miscellaneous publications and manuals are almost random samples. They include product news bulletins and a series of computer operating and programming manuals. Historical miscellany includes a history of the Advanced Technological Laboratories, a paper on RCA's contributions to the space program, copies of two architectural articles on buildings in the Camden Plant, and programs from award ceremonies. "Instructions" are short operating instructions for RCA devices or looseleaf trade catalog pages for an assortment of electronic components. Finally there are series of training manuals prepared by RCA Institutes, Inc., including ones on computer programming and television repair.