The Straus Center's archives and special collections are extraordinary resources for training and research. Treatment records dating back to the 1920s document the conservation history of thousands of works of art. The records of works in the Art Museums' collections are accessible to outside scholars and researchers as well as to museum staff and provide important information about conservation techniques in previous decades as well as a full history of treatments performed on specific works of art.

The Straus Center maintains an archive of over 4,000 X-radiographs of paintings and other works of art from museums worldwide, taken over the course of sixty years. Many of these X-radiographs are the only ones in existence for particular works of art. This archive was begun by Alan Burroughs, a pioneer in the application of X-radiography to the examination of works of art, and is an invaluable resource for conservators, interns, and outside scholars.

The Forbes Collection of Materials of the Artist contains hundreds of pigment samples and other painting materials from all over the world, ancient as well as modern, Asian as well as Western. It also includes palettes, brushes, and paints actually used by such artists as John Singer Sargent, and José Clemente Orozco. The collection represents Forbes' lifelong interest in the technical aspects of painting. Although the emphasis is on traditional materials, the collection includes representatives ranging from the earliest painting materials to modern synthetics. When Forbes died, samples from the collection were distributed to several museums and conservation departments. As a consequence, many institutions have small "Forbes" collections but the core of the larger collection remains at Harvard. The collection, which is now properly catalogued, serves as the basis for the analytical study of a variety of artist materials.

The Gettens Collection of Aged Pigments and Media, begun in the 1930s, comprises several hundred carefully documented samples of aged pigments in a variety of media, including oil, egg, resins, and varnishes. The collection contains raw materials as well as test blocks with various paint and coating layers. The raw materials are well-documented and most are in their original bottles. The paint blocks are also well-documented with the names of the pigment, binder, manufacture, coating and the date of the application. The catalogue of the Gettens Collection, nearly complete, contains records for 267 raw materials, 2666 pigment blocks, and 369 painting supports. The raw materials have been analyzed by FT-IR spectroscopy and are available as a spectral library of reference materials.

The Straus Center's specialized reference library is an important source of historical and technical information published over the past half century. The collection, which is exclusively devoted to conservation topics and the material science of art materials, contains approximately 2500 volumes. The library was founded through the efforts of Edward W. Forbes in the late 1920s and expanded with the work of Rutherford Gettens and George Stout. The collection has grown over the decades with the careful selection of new volumes and national and international periodicals by staff conservators.