Tuesday, February 15, 2005

An interesting take on the online catalog

After reading Andrew Pace's latest monthly column in American Libraries, I thought I'd take another look at RedLightGreen, which RLG offers as a new take on online catalog interfaces. Here's what Pace likes about RedLightGreen:

[It] indexes over 120 million records, ranked in order of relevance to the search term and based on how many copies of a title exist in libraries. RedLightGreen not only retrieves relevant results, it does so in a timely manner, with a simple-to-use interface. One of its most impressive features is the way it clusters various editions and manifestations of a work into a single display. For example, there are 59 variations of Death of a Salesman; most library systems would scatter these throughout search results, but RedLightGreen renders them in a single display. The system is also set up to link to numerous local catalogs so that users can use RedLightGreen to discover appropriate titles and then look up holdings in a local catalog.

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