The Catalog keeps track of each of the physical items a library receives. We control the catalog. There are librarians at UW who are paid to do nothing but enter new items as they come in. There is one catalog for all of the UW Libraries.
Indexes keep track of all the articles in a list of journals, or within one field of study.
We do not control indexes, we just subscribe to them. Someone else pays people to look through the magazines and journals and write the abstracts. We subscribe to over 100 indexes. When you begin to choose a topic. Contains citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, and technical reports in the field of psychology and psychological aspects of related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business, and law.