From 1907–1939 the members of the Lithuanian Science Society (Lith. Lietuvių mokslo draugija – LMD) gathered previously documented manuscript folklore collections, collected folklore themselves, and encouraged others to do the same. The inherited collections were numbered and entered into an inventory book, however it is obvious that a portion of the collections were not described. Others were borrowed and never returned to the archive, and thus remained in private collections. Up until the present day, the Lithuanian Folklore Archives have preserved the majority of this collection, comprising 1,269 folklore compilations (over 50,000 pages, 82,000 folklore items) that were recorded in the 19th–first part of the 20th centuries. The collection was digitized in 2010–2012 in accordance with the Lithuanian Science Council funded project “Lithuanian Folklore Archives: digitization and dissemination of collections”, and made accessible in the Lithuanian Folklore Archives database.

In 2013,  The Collections of the Lithuanian Science Society (19th–mid 20th c.) that are kept at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore and Vilnius University Library were included in the UNESCO “Memory of the World” national register as objects of documentary heritage of national significance (registration No. 55).

The Lithuanian Science Society’s  collection comprises three funds  — LMD I, LMD II, and LMD III. The digitized registration book of these funds can be found in the section of inventory documents.

 LMD I fund is the largest and contains 996 compilations of folklore documented from 1800–1932 throughout Lithuania. The collection’s signature is LMD I 1–1068 (around 100 items of this collection disappeared when transferring the archive from one place to another). Housed there are folklore collections of renowned Lithuanian writers and public figures - Jonas Basanavičius, Simonas Daukantas, Mečislovas Davainis-Silvestraitis, Žemaitė, Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė, Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, Laurynas Ivinskis, Matas Slančiauskas, Jurgis Elisonas, and others. Some of the LMD collections contain original, hand-written documents of the folklore collector, however a part of the collections are duplicates, such as Simonas Stanevičius’s song collection that was re-transcribed by Simonas Daukantas. Also kept here are the collections transcribed by the students of Vytautas Magnus high school. These transcriptions were made during the years that Vilnius was occupied by Poland, and were sent to the Lithuanian institutions that had been relocated to Kaunas; after World War II, they returned to Vilnius.