Following the practice of major international institutions, the National Gallery of Canada recognized the need to make its permanent collection known to scholars, museum curators and the public at large by publishing catalogues. From the first check list printed in 1882, these catalogues have evolved over the years into sets of illustrated volumes as the collection grew and as the practice of art history changed. By the late 1970s, when the last hard-copy edition was initiated, the catalogue of the Canadian collection alone had grown to be a set of four volumes. Progress was slow and the first volume in the series was published in 1988, while the second was released only in 1994. By then the Canadian collection had already doubled and it had become clear that the project was not only marred by an aging concept but also under serious threat from a severe shortage of resources, a situation that showed no sign of improvement in the near future. The project needed an in-depth restructuring in order to drastically reduce compilation time and production costs. The result was a proposal to produce within 2 years a catalogue covering the 16,000 works in the Canadian collection and to publish it on CD-ROM. The proposal was approved in April 1994. This paper will explore the benefits and implications of abandoning the hard-copy publication in favour ofthe CD-ROM, as well as the methodology involved in the preparation of the new Catalogue of Canadian Art of the National Gallery of Canada.