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Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library, Archives & Information Science is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the nowadays world characterized by complexity, the digital systems for archival and bibliographic description are, especially in Italy, a faithful mirror of too many horizontal (among bodies with national functions) and vertical (among central and peripheral levels) complications. The integration of data sets conceived according to the up-to-date conceptual domain models would simplify the dynamics of representation, improve user experiences, and optimize the environmental costs of computing infrastructures. The concepts to be shared should relate to agents (individual or collective), places, and chronological data, deepening on how to address the more complex issues opened by things. This paper introduces three possible scenarios of semantic cooperation between archivists and librarians, not necessarily alternative: activating a conceptual matching through common entities, relying on a neutral semantic data infrastructure such as Wikidata, or, finally, developing a transversal core ontology. Hoping that disciplinary boundaries will not impede cooperation, two types of impediments must be considered: the organizational one (bottom-up, top-down, or a virtuous synergy between the two organizational models?) and the crucial issue of offering easy-to-use interfaces to end-users, not only constituted by software agents.

The article deals with the themes of integration between the different cataloguing and disciplinary descriptive traditions. It initially evaluates the transition phase from methods to established practices up to the new solicitations caused by the transformations of information production models. Lastly, the paper focus on the theme of the reconceptualization of domain languages ​​to move on to outline the concept of metacataloguing as a possible descriptive synthesis.