Part of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Gordon McKay Library was incorporated into the Cabot Science Library in 2016. As the Cabot website explains, the Gordon McKay collection "focuses on materials in the fields of applied mathematics, applied physics, bioengineering, computer science, data science, decision and control theory, electrical and mechanical engineering, environmental sciences, materials science, robotics, theoretical mechanics, water resources, and systems design."

In the archive of educational 16mm films the Harvard Film Archive inherited from this collection, the central theme is fluid mechanics; however this archive also contains films on meterology and various topics in physics and mechanics, most dating from the Sixties and Seventies. A sampling of the generally self-explanatory titles includes: Are Atoms Real? (1960), Crystal Growth (ca.1970), Deformation of Continuous Media (1963), Dynamics of Radiation Damage (ca.1962), Formation of Raindrops (1969), Magentohydrodynamics (1960), Rational Bi-cubic Surfaces (1969), Sea Surface Meterology (1965), Stratified Flow (1968), Solar Radiation (1967) and Voyager I Jupiter (ca.1979).

This collection is catalogued in HOLLIS.