The Vault at Pfaff's currently includes biographical sketches of over 150 individuals who were part of the bohemian literary movement at Pfaff's beer hall. A complete list of these individuals is available on the site, as is a list of some of the smaller groups that formed within the larger Pfaff's scene. Additionally, a search engine has been provided for visitors to the site who wish to generate lists of individuals based on such criteria as gender, profession, and date of birth or death.

In the course of conducting research on these individuals, it became apparent that the information regarding their lives in general and their involvement with the Pfaff's bohemians in particular was, at times, limited and, just as often, of questionable reliability. The exact nature of the scene at Pfaff's was always under debate, as the image to the right suggest. This depiction of the Pfaffians in the midst of a debauched revel was originally published in the New York Illustrated News in the early 1860s. Soon after publishing this image, the Illustrated News ran a "corrected" version depicting the Pfaffians gathered soberly around a table, consumed not by their baser passions, but by a conversation on the arts.

Rather than pass judgment on the relative merits of the information available about the Pfaff's bohemians, the editors of The Vault at Pfaff's have decided to accompany each biographical profile with an annotated list of the references used to determine an individual's relationship to Pfaff's. This effort to make transparent the sources used to identify someone as a Pfaffian also allows visitors to the site to connect these biographies with the database of works by and about the Pfaff's bohemians. The references that appear at the end of each biographical sketch contain hyperlinks to full bibliographic records and, when available, electronic versions of the texts in question.

(More individuals have been identified as potential Pfaffians, and biographies for these people will be added by the summer of 2007.)