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From 1896, when the collection of Welsh manuscripts from the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Middle Hill, including the Book of Aneirin ('Llyfr Aneirin'), was bought by Cardiff Library, the Cardiff collection was regarded as that of a potential Welsh national library. With other notable manuscript accessions, including the Tonn, Havod, Cadrawd, Scott, Bradley and Wooding collections, Cardiff Library challenged the National Library at Aberystwyth as a collector of Welsh literary, historical and antiquarian manuscripts.

Between 1980 and 1984, most of the Cardiff manuscripts were sent to the National Library in batches for microfilming. The microfilms listed in this catalogue have since been available for consultation at NLW. During this period, the opportunity was taken by two members of staff, Graham Thomas and Daniel Huws, to prepare a summary catalogue of the manuscripts. The cataloguing work was undertaken at speed when other duties permitted. There are therefore inadequacies and inconsistencies in the summary catalogue. The summary catalogue also lists manuscripts which were never filmed - some were excluded deliberately, a few by oversight, and some had to be excluded because of exhaustion of the funding of the project. Also, some manuscripts (indicated by the letters GRO in the summary catalogue) had been transferred to Glamorgan Record Office before filming took place. Nevertheless, both the microfilming programme and the compilation of the catalogue represented a major step forward in the process of creating public access to the Cardiff manuscripts. This catalogue, ostensibly a list of microfilm copies of the Cardiff manuscripts, but in effect an on-line catalogue of the content, provenance, and physical characteristics of the bulk of the manuscripts in the collection, represents a further step in that process.