Verso una nuova struttura catalografica dei dati bibliografici

Catalog has changed many shapes before becoming an electronic one. When Panizzi was a librarian, there was a hierarchical order into the catalog. In the transition from the book-catalog to the file-card catalog each book had to be described on a new card. The passage was from a panoramic to a fragmentary structure of the organization of information. The new forms of catalog turned on the debate on the retrieval rather than on the grouping function of the catalog. Can the catalog be reconsidered in terms referring to the panoramic function of the book-catalog, in a new version by technology? The attention is pointed to one data or one descriptive element rather than to the catalog itself nor to the cataloguing by access or description. The catalog is now dynamic on the basis of the needs of single people using it; the data making the catalog can be recovered in the universe of information. Interest, doubts, fascination, and scepticism are all mixed together