Margaret Currier was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 8, 1910, to Thomas Franklin Currier and Florence Wyman Currier. Her father was the Associate Librarian of Harvard University. She attended Belmont High School in Belmont, Massachusetts, from 1923-1927. She entered Mount Holyoke College in 1927 and graduated with her B.A. degree in German in 1931. She received her B.A.L.S. (Library Science) from the University of Michigan in 1935. She also took graduate courses at Yale University from 1934 to 1936, and at Harvard University in 1944. From 1931-1934, Currier worked as an Assistant Cataloguer at Yale University library. From 1936-1939, she worked as the Cataloguer in Yale University library. She worked as the Curator of the Catalog at the Harvard College Library from 1939-1945. From 1945 until her retirement in 1974, Currier was a librarian in the Library of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She died on March 11, 1998, in Concord, Massachusetts at the age of eighty-seven.

The Margaret Currier Papers consist of correspondence, course records, memorabilia, biographical information, and photographs. Most of this collection consists of letters written by Currier to her parents, 1928-1938. The correspondence describes her years as a student at Mount Holyoke College, 1928-1931. It includes detailed descriptions of her course work, teachers, examinations, musical activities, and work in the Mount Holyoke College library. Correspondence dating from 1931-1934 describes her work in the Yale University library and her social life in New Haven, Connecticut. The correspondence also includes information about her graduate studies at the University of Michigan from 1934-1935, and her return to work at the Yale University library, 1936-1938. Letters written in the summers of 1935 and 1936 describe trips in the United States to Colorado, Maine, and elsewhere. There are a number of references in Currier's letters to the impact of the Depression upon the library profession. Three letters written to Currier from her Mount Holyoke College classmates Florence Feicht Boyer and Shuh-yin Lu Mar are also included in this collection. Boyer discusses her trip to England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1937 while Mar describes her experiences in Hankow, China and Hong Kong at the beginning of the Sino-Japanese Conflict, 1937-1938. Also of note in the collection are course records consisting of a paper written for a French class at Mount Holyoke College, 1928, and two general examinations in German from 1931.

This collection is organized into five series:

• Correspondence
• Course Records
• Memorabilia
• Biographical Information
• Photographs