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Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age encompasses historically important writings by prominent Puerto Rican political activists and historians dating from approximately seventy years before the Spanish-American war (1831) until some thirty years after it (1929). Texts from the postwar period include the only English-language works in the collection. Among these are soldiers' reminiscences about the conflict and short histories designed to acquaint an American audience with Puerto Rico in the earliest years of its affiliation with the United States.

The collection comprises 11 monographs scanned from printed copies and 39 political pamphlets and 2 monographs and a journal scanned from microfilm. The pamphlets are part of the Puerto Rican Memorial Collection, 1846-1907, a collection of 447 pamphlets microfilmed in 1994 that covers agriculture and botany, economics, education, government, politics, history, literature, legal materials, and public health. Reels 13 (addresses, essays, laws, and political parties) and 14 (politics and government) are featured in Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age. All pamphlets are in Spanish. Four of the books are in English and the rest in Spanish. The materials in the collection were selected by Edmundo Flores, a curator in the Hispanic Division.

Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age does not present a socially comprehensive view of Puerto Rican history during the period it covers. The books and pamphlets in this collection were written by educated men of European descent whose perspectives inevitably differed from the viewpoints of those less privileged in Puerto Rican society at the time. Individuals of African descent, and to a lesser extent women, seldom had access to the education or technology that would have enabled them to leave published records of their thoughts, deeds, and daily life.

The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division began assembling LOTs in the late 1940s to provide convenient access to sets of pictures. Most LOTs were received as copyright registration groups, as donations, or as transfers of visual material from personal papers and record groups in the Manuscript Division. Approximately 13,000 LOTs had been assembled by 2009, with new LOTs added each year.

Originally, descriptions of each LOT were maintained in a card catalog called the "Divisional Catalog." Starting in 1986, descriptions of newly cataloged LOTs were added only to the online catalogs, with full subject headings and notes. In 2005, the old card catalog entries were converted to online records, except for the subject headings, which can still be consulted in the Prints & Photographs Reading Room. This card file covers each LOT cataloged through the 1980s, with numerous access points for creators and subjects filling almost 150 card drawers.