The Index has expedited and clarified scholarly investigations, earning a reputation as an incomparable humanistic research tool for medieval scholars as well as art historians. For example: A scholar cataloguing a European museum collection, anxious to date a cross holding the key to identification of other objects, wrote to the Christian Art Index as well as to the director of another museum, reputed to have a similar cross. The museum director confirmed the likeness of the crosses supplied a date, and expressed surprise at the inquiry -- he had thought his the only existing one of its kind. The Princeton Index, however, sent the scholar photostatic reproductions of seven other crosses, similar in all essential details, and cited a publication that convincingly dated the execution two centuries earlier than the museum director had.
Alison Smith MacDonald did the first formal cataloguing from 1918 to 1920. Phila Calder Nye, director from 1920 to 1933, kept the project going, when funds were lacking, with voluntary assistance from nine women (known as the Nine Muses). In the twenties the Index acquired an endowment of $200,000; in the thirties its resources were further increased by expendable gifts of $156,000. Helen Woodruff, director from 1933 to 1942, worked out the form for recording descriptive and bibliographical information that has been the Index's hallmark ever since. William L. M. Burke was director from 1942 to 1951. Rosalie B. Green succeeded him in 1951.
So helpful has the Index been in saving scholars hours -- even weeks or months -- of research time, that four complete copies have been made available elsewhere: at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (1940), at the Vatican (1951), at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands (1962), at the University of California, Los Angeles (1964).
Martha Lou Stohlman