The files for the Bonner papers were donated by his son, James (Jim) C. Bonner, Jr. and brought to Special Collections for processing in several different sets. Over time, the collection became increasingly intermingled, which led to researcher confusion and made it difficult to find specific information. Due to this, the collection was extensively reprocessed in 2016 to place all materials into separate series based on topics, using as much of the original classification as possible. Numerous folders within series were combined.