The ISA Archive preserves the visual and institutional legacies of prominent social anthropologists. Key collections include the work of wM (Full Academy Member) Walter Dostal, the multimedia documentation of Werner Finke, and a comprehensive photo database of South Arabia compiled by wM Andre Gingrich, wM Walter Dostal, and Johann Heiss. These holdings comprise thousands of slides, negatives, audio tapes, films, notebooks, and lecture manuscripts.

The archive also houses the personal library and working papers of Ranajit Guha (1923-2023), the founder of the Subaltern Studies movement who spent his final decades in Austria. This collection documents the intellectual trajectory of one of the 20th century’s most influential historians, who profoundly shaped the intersections of South Asian historiography, postcolonial theory, and European social thought.

ISA furthermore serves as the official repository for the archives of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). This institutional collection preserves the records of the association's foundational years, its biennial conferences, and its significant role in shaping the landscape of professional anthropology across Europe.

Materials are processed through various research projects to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility. Documents are digitized in high resolution, indexed via the AAS catalogue, and archived through the ARCHE repository. To categorize these assets, the ISA utilizes an adapted version of the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), a classification system originally developed by G. P. Murdock and used to subject-index eHRAF World Cultures. The ISA adaptation, developed with permission from HRAF, is available as a downloadable PDF with ISA modifications marked.

Where rights have been transferred to the ISA – through donation (Werner Finke) or bequest (wM Walter Dostal) – photographs are published under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Some materials remain offline for ethical or legal reasons, including items with unclarified copyrights, images withheld to protect depicted individuals from political persecution or to safeguard children, and damaged or test photographs. Researchers may request access to these restricted materials for scientific purposes by contacting sozialanthropologie(at)oeaw.ac.at

Recent initiatives include the publication of selected Yemen photographs by Werner Dostal in the Kulturpool and the Academy Catalog. Furthermore, Werner Finke’s documentation of Kurdish settlement areas in Turkey will be made available through the Academy Catalog and a curated project website as part of the FWF PEEK project "ZOZAN – Investigations on Mobility through Multimedia Documentation". Furthermore, ISA is currently developing a detailed catalogue of the Ranajit Guha archive and establishing fellowship programs to attract international scholars to work with the collection. In conjunction with these efforts, the institute is exploring comprehensive options for the archive’s future digitization to ensure global scholarly access.