1970s – Prof. Gerald Eades Bentley (1901-1994), acting head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Princeton University Library in the early 1970s, compiles on 3 x 5 cards descriptions of the approximately 35 separately arranged collections of printed books. No such file of descriptions existed so it is likely he prepared these to inform himself of the Department’s holdings of which he was in charge. These cards were passed along to the Curator of Rare Books who arrived in November 1975. They became the basis for the 1984 Guide to Selected Special Collections for Printed Books and Other Materials in the Princeton University Library. The ‘Guide’ was ‘an Oxford Companion style reference work presenting capsule summaries regarding holdings relevant to more than 250 topics.’
1984 – ‘Guide’ as printed document first issued in 1984. This was laser printed output of a SCRIPT document running on the University mainframe. It was updated regularly, that is, entries were added and / or updated. Maintained by the Curator of Rare Books.
1997 – ‘Guide’ moved to the Web – earliest capture in the Internet Archive is 2 August 1997 — see
https://web.archive.org/web/19970802014615/http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/handbook.html
2015– The ‘Guide’ was hosted on the Curator’s personal University-provided web server space until April 2015 when it was moved to server space used by the Special Collections in general – At transfer it stood at 300 entries. It was expanded further after transfer to include other topics added by Special Collections reference staff, such as ‘Academic History’ see, for example,
https://web.archive.org/web/20150411073248/http://rbsc.princeton.edu/topics
2019 – The URL for ‘Topics’ was changed in October 2019 – see
https://web.archive.org/web/20191027094817/https://library.princeton.edu/special-collections/topics
2024 – ‘Topics’ remained at the 2019 URL until June 2024 — The last capture is here
https://web.archive.org/web/20240530065223/https://library.princeton.edu/special-collections/topics
June 2024 to the present — ‘Topics’ (including the content of its predecessor ‘Guide’) no longer appears on the Library’s website.