After Albert Schweitzer's death in 1965, his former secretary, Ali Silver, began in 1967, to gather and to order his spiritual inheritance.
Over 10.000 letters written by Dr. Schweitzer and approximately 70.000 sent to him, his hand-written books and sermons manuscripts, already published or not, are classified in the archives. The most important of those archive documents are reproduced on microfilms.
Extracts of newspapers, slides, films, tape recordings, videocassettes, and plates are also collected. They permit to keep lively speeches, pieces of music interpreted by A. Schweitzer, and to have a general idea of Albert Schweitzer's life, work and thoughts.
Students, professors, lecturers' come to Gunsbach for researches working on Albert Schweitzer.
Many doctorate-thesis have been written about Schweitzer's life during the last few years.
As a gesture of gratitude for all the facilities granted to him during several years of research, Albert Schweitzer offered 2.000 volumes to Strasbourg University. But still thousands of books are on the shelves of the library in Gunsbach. They are not only interesting by the fact to see what he read but even more by his annotations which show his opinions about them. It is the same for the newspapers, which are kept in.