What is a Catalog?
A catalog classifies and determines how items within a system relate to each other.
A catalog contains data about items, also known as properties or metadata.
Get Overview and Control
A catalog is very useful for overviewing and controlling a large collection of items. A well-made catalog makes it easy to oversee, edit, and continually extend an asset library, even with thousands of assets.
This is why all real-world book libraries always use a catalog, also known as a registry or an index, and would not function without it.
An asset library is more than just a collection of items. In a library, each item has its place within an ordered system. It is this system's specific form that enables users to effortlessly achieve common tasks.
Compfire will make use of the catalog that you create for your assets.
Divvy Up Your Assets
Catalogs are also known as taxonomies. Catalogs use Branches to classify items. Together, these branches make up a Category Tree.
This tree is very useful for searching, filtering, browsing and importing assets.
Purposeful Order Pays Off
Many users browse the catalog hundreds of times per day. The larger the library, and the more intensive the use, the more important it is to make the catalog purposefully ordered. Systematizing items requires work investment. However, when all users can quickly and reliably find, add, and count items, it often pays back in raised output quality, fewer errors, and saved time.
A good catalog is more than an abstraction. A good catalog should mirror how end users ideally ought to conceive of the assets when interacting with them in their daily work. A catalog thus often suggests a kind of implicit workflow. If users' needs or ideal workflows change, the catalog structure may also need an update.
An accessible and powerful way to represent catalog data is to use a Spreadsheet with Columns and Rows. Compfire's catalog is a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet may be opened and edited in several common spreadsheet editors, including Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheets.