It does not completely supersede the earlier documents and is not a single alphabetical listing of holdings. Rather, it is a compendium of twenty-one separate lists, broken down roughly by field, and intended to be consulted by anyone, but especially undergraduate history majors, doing research at Princeton in a given area.
Some items appear on more than one list.
Omitted are newspapers, materials in non-western languages, monographs that have been filmed for preservation purposes and a number of small items found in Coleman's original guide. Because it supplies call numbers, the guide lists only catalogued items. Most lists are updated annually.