Anyone wishing to know what has been written on the Pennsylvania Germans will welcome the reappearance of this classic bibliography. Anyone aspiring to a command of the literature on the Pennsylvania Germans must master its contents; and anyone doing research in Pennsylvania-German genealogy must have it at his side. It is basic, and no efficient research can be done without it. Divided into subject categories, the bibliography contains citations to all published writings dealing with the Germans in colonial North America (chiefly Pennsylvania), whether in the form of general histories, magazine articles, newspapers, pamphlets, mug-books, church records, town, county, and state histories, or printed genealogies, and it attempts to give as complete an account of the printed source material as possible. It is in effect the starting point in Pennsylvania-German research because it acquaints the researcher with everything that had been published up through the cut-off year of 1933.

Liste signalétique des documents parus entre 1981 et 1985: livres, articles, thèses. L'organisation de la bibliographie est en trois sections: systématique (par ordre des grands sujets), analytique (par ordre des sujets particuliers), auteur (par ordre des noms avec renvois à la section systématique). Les auteurs ont intégré à l'instrument des documents non recensés dans les ouvrages couvrant les périodes antérieures: 1948-1965, 1966-1975, 1976-1980.

This "work is organized by subject. Materials are grouped under twelve main sections in the body of the work, with appropriate subdivisions and subtopics within each main subject. Each section is assigned a two-letter designation, and entries are numbered consecutively within each section. This subject code system was designed to facilitate referals from the Index to the main body of the text, and to allow for cross-referencing between sections."--Introduction.