The diaries were typed on 5" x 7" pages with the intention of storing them in small ring-clamp notebooks, and for many years supplemental material such as speeches, letters, newspaper clippings and other ephemera were punched with the same notebook holes and kept with the diary pages. This arrangement has been preserved. When used for content in individual books, Ivan removed some diary pages and placed them in book file folders of Series 2, Books and Other Writings.

Carol Doig indicates that while Ivan was creating a story he used different colored paper to identify his progress. Random white pages were pulled from the working manuscript when changes were to be made and these would be replaced by edited pages. Yellow pages represent seminal thoughts and jottings, some of which would work their way into a finished manuscript. Finally, Ivan would use blue pages to indicate scenes he'd written later than the original manuscript. However, this pattern of work is not consistently represented in the various subseries of this collection. Doig also wrote a synopsis or book proposal at the beginning of each project. Some of these documents are filed with the individual book materials and others are found in the Publisher correspondence files. The following inventory represents, with very few exceptions, the original arrangement and folder titles provided by librarian Betty Mayfield who prepared the collection for donation. Some of these folder divisions originally contained hundreds of sheets which were divided into more convenient numbers during archival processing. In those cases, the original folder title is repeated in subsequent folder divisions and indicated by (cont.) If page numbers are present in any manuscript listings, those numbers are given after the (cont.) marker.

An asterisk (*) following any folder listing indicates that photographic images or 35mm transparencies originally placed in that folder have been removed for listing in Series 8. All folder numbers appearing as blue hyperlinks will open a separate window and display a PDF file of the entire folder contents.

Doig's original arrangement has been retained. The numbered tabs in each box refer to the cards preceding the tabs. Occasionally Doig would remove cards and place them within a working manuscript for referral, or sort them in a different manner depending on the composition he was working on. As a result, some of the tabs mark sections that are completely empty, yet they have been retained to assist in demonstrating his original intent. These tabs are so marked.