This collection (1880-2011, undated) contains materials related to Schwieder's many years in academia. Starting with her own personal coursework from her Ph.D. studies at the University of Iowa, the collection traces her academic career, including presentations, publications, and research done on a variety of topics. Schwieder's work includes research on the Iowa State Cooperative Extension Service, Amish and other communitarian societies in Iowa, the town of Presho, South Dakota, women and work, coal mining in Iowa, and a large scale research project completed with her husband, Elmer Schwieder, and Joe Hraba on the African-American coal mining community of Buxton, Iowa.

Also included are course notes and outlines for the many classes Schwieder taught at Iowa State University. Schwieder taught both undergraduate and graduate classes and developed several courses, including History of Iowa and graduate seminars in American Rural Life and Rural Women. Numerous files contain notes, exams, syllabi, and news clippings of topics for her classes.

The collection also contains media materials related to two oral history projects. The first is the history of the Iowa State Cooperative Extension Service, which provided material for her book, Seventy-five Years of Service: Cooperative Extension in Iowa (1992). The second oral history project was done for the documentary film, The Last Pony Mine.

Materials for the history of the Extension Service include transcripts, release forms, and cassette tapes of interviews, conducted by Dorothy Schwieder and Tom Morain from 1987 to 1991. Materials for The Last Pony Mine include magnetic tapes (7 inch and 5 inch reels) of interviews collected in the early 1970s. Schwieder's oral histories of coal miners at the New Gladstone coalmine, in Appanoose County, Iowa, formed the basis for the award-winning 1973 documentary The Last Pony Mine. The documentary depicted a day in the life of coalminers at New Gladstone, which was one of the last advancing longwall mines that used ponies for underground haulage. The film won the Gold Camera Award at the U.S. Industrial Film Festival in 1973, and the Cine Golden Eagle Award. A VHS copy of this film is available in the Parks Library Media Collection (Vide 007 881).

Also included are a series of slides used in Schwieder's classes, covering topics such as Iowa artists, coal mining towns in Iowa, and the Buxton community.

A map case folder contains larger copies of census data, as well as photographs from the community of Buxton used in the book Buxton: A Black Utopia in the Heartland.