The Brown Instrument Company developed, manufactured, and sold industrial controls and measuring instruments, such as thermometers, pressure gauges, voltmeters, and pyrometers. The company was founded in 1857 by an English engineer and inventor, Edward Brown (1834-1905). The records of the Brown Instrument Company consist of research files documenting the development of measuring instruments and industrial control systems used in continuous process manufacturing.

James R. Matey preserved documents which help to explain his work in developing instruments used to control and manipulate data and materials, tools to measure the impact of materials introduced in his experiments, and microscopes which became useful to describe and improve various products. His work is reflected clearly by the number of patents he received, and by the many records which document his work with microscopy, picture tubes, and VideoDiscs.

The Matey papers includes photographs, overhead transparencies, 35mm slides, videocassettes, and one video disc. These depict work done with scanning capacitance microscopy (SCaM) including micrographs of silicone on sapphire, video discs, and graphs and diagrams used in a presentation on scanning capacitance microscopy.

Twenty-nine of Matey's lab notebooks (1977-1991) can be found in Record group 26.