Catalogo

Catalogo is a noun used in Italian and Spanish to denote a systematic list of items, typically with descriptive information such as title, author, date, and sometimes price or location. In English the cognate term is catalog or catalogue. The word derives from the Latin catalogus, itself from the Greek katalagos meaning "a listing" or "register."

Catalogs serve as tools for organization, discovery, and planning. In libraries and archives a catalog records bibliographic items and holdings, enabling users to locate copies and related works; cataloging is the formal process of creating and maintaining those records. In commerce, a product catalog lists items for sale, often with specifications, images, and prices. In museums and art collections, catalogs document objects in a collection, including provenance and dating; in music and literature, catalogs classify works by composer or author.

Catalogs appear in many formats. Traditional print catalogs have largely given way to digital catalogs accessed online. Digital catalogs rely on metadata standards and controlled vocabularies; common practical systems include MARC-based bibliographic catalogs and Dublin Core metadata, with more recent models aligned to FRBR and linked data. Union catalogs aggregate records from multiple libraries, while online public access catalogs allow end users to search across holdings.

Historical development moved from simple inventories and manuscript lists to printed catalogs in the early modern period, followed by card catalogs in the 19th and 20th centuries, and finally to online catalogs and discovery interfaces. The concept remains central to information management, retailing, and collection management, with ongoing emphasis on interoperability and semantic search.