Before digital databases, researchers used index cards. 

Over nearly four decade of geniza research, S. D. Goitein created nearly 29,000 index cards related to geniza documents. Goitein’s published and unpublished scholarship are equally worth consulting; the index cards have served as an indispensable resource for researchers for four generations of scholars.

Goitein’s index cards come in two groups.

• More than seven thousand contain descriptions of single geniza fragments. Our team has linked each of these cards to its corresponding shelfmark in the PGP database, so as you're exploring the database, you can see what interested Goitein. 
• Most of Goitein’s cards cover topics, and these cards usually contain more than one shelfmark. In his original card files, Goitein arranged these cards according to topical sequence, and our team has developed an index for it. Topic cards overlap with the documentary infrastructure of A Mediterranean Society, but extend well beyond it.

Goitein wrote the notes on his cards in some combination of English, Hebrew and Arabic, with occasional words in other languages, including German and Persian. (Be warned that some researchers find his handwriting as challenging to decipher as those of the scribes who wrote medieval documents.)

We are grateful to our partners at the National LIbrary of Israel and the kind permission of Goitein’s children Elon Goitein and Ayala Gordon for permission to reproduce the cards on our websites, to Nadia Vidro for indexing the index cards, and to Ben Johnston for putting them online.

Oded Zinger published a guide to using Goitein's index cards in 2019.