The Card Cat­a­log served as Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library’s pri­mary data­base of acquired hold­ings until it was closed in 1981 when a major change in cat­a­loging rules (AACR2) was adopted by the Library of Con­gress and all major research libraries in North Amer­ica, Great Britain and many other libraries world-wide. As of 1981, no new cat­a­loging was added to the Card Cat­a­log. Updat­ing of penciled-in bound vol­ume hold­ing nota­tions to the records for exist­ing ser­ial and book-set titles con­tin­ued to be made until 1989, when a project to ret­ro­spec­tively con­vert all active card ser­ial and set titles was con­sum­mated. After 1989, there­fore, the Card Cat­a­log became a sta­tic par­tial rep­re­sen­ta­tion of titles which the Library had acquired prior to 1981; in the ter­mi­nol­ogy of the period, its sta­tus had changed from being “closed” to being “dead.”

In 1969, a micro­film copy was made of the pre-AACR2 Card Cat­a­log as a backup for secu­rity rea­sons. This film copy is stored at the Library’s remote book shelv­ing facil­ity (ReCAP). A large num­ber of the older hand-written card files in the Card Cat­a­log had, at some ear­lier time, been re-typed, likely as a preser­va­tion mea­sure. Doc­u­men­ta­tion describ­ing when this deci­sion was made, and the extent to which it was applied, has been lost.

A sep­a­rate AACR2 com­pat­i­ble card cat­a­log, which rep­re­sented a hard copy man­i­fes­ta­tion of machine-readable cat­a­loging pro­duced online as of 1981, briefly served as the active data­base of Library hold­ings from 1981 through 1984. The AACR2 card cat­a­log was dis­carded in 1985 and replaced and by the Library’s first online cat­a­log, TOMUS (com­monly referred to as “Car­lyle,” after the name of the com­pany which mar­keted the under­ly­ing hardware/software platform).

Changes, such as the whole­sale replace­ment of Richard­son call num­bers with LC call num­bers pro­ceed­ing from the cur­rent reclas­si­fi­ca­tion project, are not reflected in the card images of the Sup­ple­men­tary Cat­a­log. In 1998–2000, machine read­able cat­a­loging (MARC) records for the entire pre-AACR2 Card Cat­a­log were pro­duced and loaded into the Library’s Main (Online) Cat­a­log. These records, sup­plied under con­tract with OCLC, were enhanced to include com­plete hold­ings from the shelf-list, and updated by the addi­tion of AACR2 com­pat­i­ble head­ings, and other more con­tem­po­rary and author­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion, ren­der­ing the Card Cat­a­log obso­lete, except as an his­tor­i­cal artifact.

At the time when the preser­va­tion scan­ning, which ulti­mately pro­duced the Sup­ple­men­tal Cat­a­log, was planned, an exhaus­tive analy­sis was made of the card ver­sos to deter­mine whether or not there was crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion on the backs of the cards which needed to be pre­served, because it could not be recon­structed from other sources, par­tic­u­larly the Library’s shelf-list. No such infor­ma­tion was found in this analy­sis, so the deci­sion was made to abstain from scan­ning the card ver­sos. In response to a more recent resur­gence of con­cerns about the pres­ence of impor­tant infor­ma­tion on the backs of the cards in the old Card Cat­a­log, a sam­pling of over 10,000 cards from the older files within the cat­a­log con­firmed the orig­i­nal analy­sis, i.e., not one instance of infor­ma­tion on the card ver­sos was uncov­ered which was not accounted for in the cor­re­spond­ing machine-readable record of the Library’s Online Cat­a­log. The value of the Card Cat­a­log as a source of infor­ma­tion not oth­er­wise obtain­able in the Library’s Main (online) and Sup­ple­men­tary (scanned cat­a­logs) is extremely dubi­ous, and has never been demon­strated. What is plainly appar­ent is the vast amount of mis­in­for­ma­tion about the Library’s hold­ings which the Card Cat­a­log now con­tains, espe­cially since the Richard­son reclas­si­fi­ca­tion project has inval­i­dated the call num­bers on the major­ity of the hold­ings rep­re­sented therein.