The catalog provides important insights into the literature of the various Chinese intellectual currents of the pre-Qin period (Nine Schools of Thought), of which only some 20% are presently known.
The introductory paragraph of the treatise, most likely taken verbatim from Qilue, is quite informative: "Many books were in great disarray in the time of Chengdi, upon which Chen Nong (陳農) was ordered to collect all the books in the world, and high officials to collate books in the Imperial Library; Luminous Grand Master, Liu Xiang, was put in charge of works by the Confucians, the philosophers, and the shi and fu poets; Lieutenant General of the Shanglin Imperial Garden Garrison, Ren Hong (任宏), of works by militarists, Grand Astronomer-Historian, Yin Xian (尹咸), of works by astrologers and diviners, and Surgeon to the Emperor, Li Zhuguo (李柱國), of works by herbalists and alchemists.
Liu Xin expanded the system to cover a great many books, and memorialized the Seven Abstracts, or the Qilue."
The Hanshu Yiwenzhi catalogued the Former Han Imperial Library holdings under "6 domains, 38 classes, 596 families; 13,269 scrolls in all" (大凡書，六略三十八種，五百九十六家，萬三千二百六十九卷。) concludes the treatise.
This compares favourably with the estimated 10% survival of the Pinakes titles that consisted of works in Greek, Egyptian, Aramiac, Hebrew, Persian, and other languages, in the Great Library of Alexandria of the 3rd century BCE, which according to one tradition, at one time held some 120,000 parchment scrolls and papyri.