Double check all entries in the card catalog against Orbis and the in-house manuscript finding aid (available upon request) for the current call number or box and folder number

For manuscripts, think in terms of names: who wrote it and to whom was it written

Most of the manuscript card catalogs do not have topical/subject access. Exceptions are the Clement Correspondence and Charles Hanbury Williams, although in the latter case, the subjects are only names of people mentioned in letters.

The Charles Hanbury Williams chronological cards have a brief summary of each item (which can save you time as you can get a sense of what each item is about without having to request and browse through it)

Some bound volumes have been analyzed individually on cards in the card catalog. Examples include Henry Seymour Conway and Edward Weston.

The Lady Mary Coke journals are in photostat and have been indexed by person mentioned, listing the date of each mention and a brief word of what it was about. A card at the front gives contact information for the originals and a summary of what was and was not published

The card catalog at the Lewis Walpole Library continues to provide useful access to portions of the Library's collection, supplementing the online catalogs, and serves as a resource for aspects not otherwise indexed online. In addition, there are several card catalogs, like those dealing with the contents and provenance of the contents of Strawberry Hill, that function as research resources rather than indexes to the LWL collection.

For example, the caricature and satire collection catalog cards also include prints bound into volumes as issued and prints held in other repositories available as photostats at the LWL; the manuscript card catalog also includes individual manuscripts tipped into volumes, detailed indexes of the contents of some of the bound volumes of manuscripts and photostats as well as some of the larger manuscript collections not yet in a finding aid (notably the Weston papers and the Charles Hanbury Williams correspondence), and subject access to the Clement correspondence; the portrait and topographical catalog cards include individual prints tipped into volumes and, in the case of portraits, photos from the Courtauld Institute of Art's Witt Library of reproductions after paintings.

HW's MS Notes in Books (aka Horace Walpole's MS Notes) provides exceptional subject access to Walpole's marginalia, entries in his Books of Materials, and other manuscripts and editions of his published correspondence. Library staff will identify the physical item indexed on the cards.

Some of the card catalogs are available in the reading room, while others are available upon request. Please see the list below.

N.B. The vast majority of the collection is cataloged online through the Yale Library online catalog and Finding Aids. Records in the Yale Library online catalog and Finding Aids are the most authoritative and up-to-date records for the collection. When a print or manuscript is found in the card catalog, please search in the Library online catalog or Finding Aid to request the item for delivery to the reading room. Library staff is always available to assist.