The District Six Museum curates and manages a unique collection of historical materials, fine prints and paintings, physical remains of District Six in the form of street signs and architectural vignettes, artefacts, photographic images, books, dissertations, theses, and audio-visual recordings. This growing collection has, for the most part, been donated to the museum by the large community of ex-residents of District Six.

The collection is housed in the District Six Museum, where it is divided into a large number of smaller collections, the bulk of which represent the lives of the people who lived in District Six, and also other areas of forced removal in South Africa. The collection provides a unique view of life in District Six, covering the period from the turn of the century to the present, and a broad range of topics from everyday life to political activism.

The Photographic Collection consists of approximately 8,500 photographic prints, 1,000 transparencies, and 4,500 negatives. These images date back to the turn of the century and document the process of the removal itself and the accompanying human tragedy.

Included in this collection are a number of smaller collections of works by professional photographers such as George Hallett, Jackie Heyns, Jimi Matthews, Cloete Breytenbach, and Jansje Wissema. We also have a collection of more than 1,500 architectural photographs of District Six which were taken in the 1960s and 1970s by Jan Greshoff, Professor of Architecture at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

Photographic material is available for reproduction at commercial rates. While concessions are available to ex-residents and researchers, special rates are also available for non-commercial (educational) use of selected images.

The Sound Archive was started in July 1997, when the museum received a grant from the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida). This new Sound Archive was charged with the collection, preservation, documentation and dissemination of the museum's audio-visual heritage collection, and is the first of its kind in the new South Africa.

The project was born out of the marriage of oral history with the need for a music resource for students, musicians, researchers, and the public of Cape Town. The museum has a duty to live the story even as we collect it and tell it. This is the first important strand of the archive's history. The second strand relates specifically to the museum's groundbreaking concern with memory.

The following are some examples of what is available in the museum's audio-visual collection:
- 16 mm film footage - home video from District Six (pending);
- ¼ inch reel audio collection from the film District Six, recorded in the 1980s;
- raw footage from various video productions (e.g. Music in Islam in Cape Town);
- a jazz collection of audio cassette and acetate disks from linguist and jazz enthusiast Ants Kirsipuu.

A significant percentage of the museum's collection exists in documentary evidence. This includes a newspaper record of District Six and related areas from the 1940s to the present day, original identification cards, posters and pamphlets, and also original correspondence and legal documents.

Our urgent intention is to preserve this documentary evidence as well as record and provide access to material that is not in the Museum Collection. Access to copies of original documents is provided in the Museum's Resource Centre.

The museum manages a small collection of original artworks by mostly local artists. Amongst our collection are works by Kenny and Mabel Baker, Sandra McGregor, Lionel Davis, Larry Scully, Rod Sauls and Gerard Sekoto.

The museum also houses a collection of paintings which were commissioned from local artists for it's first exhibition, Streets, in 1994.