Its collection includes oral histories, audio and video recordings, photos and other images, sheet music, personal papers, and teaching aids.

William Ransom Hogan (1908-1971) was a professor in the history department at Tulane University from 1947 until his death in 1971.

[5] Hogan obtained grants from the Ford Foundation to develop much of the original collection at the archive and to support Allen's graduate thesis project.

His interviews resulted in a collection of oral histories occupying more than 2000 reels of audio tape, which form a core part of the Hogan Jazz Archive.

From the beginning of the archive, it strived to document the extensive influence of African-Americans and Creoles of color in the early development of New Orleans jazz.

By 2022, the archive's collection went beyond oral histories, to include most types of media related to documenting the people important in the musical heritage of the jazz genre, the history of the business of jazz, and the culture that surrounded the musical genre.

[2] Some areas of emphasis have included, but are not limited to: post-Civil War military music, African-American jazz funerals, African-American second-line parades, as well as Italian-American influences such as Sicilian open-air brass performances, funeral corteges, and Catholic Saints' Day processions.

The collection includes sheet music covering the period 1838 to 1938, as well as rare books and thousands of photographs, ephemera, and personal papers of Jazz musicians and others involved in the art form.

The scope of the collection by that time also encompassed the full range of popular music of the New Orleans metropolitan area.