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NLA News - home January 2005 Volume XV Number 4

RedLightGreen
How to ‘Google’ Your Library Catalogue

Merrilee Proffitt explains how RedLightGreen makes searching library catalogues more like surfing the Web.

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Members of the RedLightGreen team pose in front of RLG’s Mountain View headquarters, 2003
Photograph by Pamela Dewey

RLG (Research Libraries Group) is an international, not-for-profit membership organisation of over 150 universities, libraries, archives, historical societies and other institutions with collections for research and learning. Founded in 1974 by The New York Public Library and Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities, RLG provides solutions to the challenges presented by information access and management in the digital era.

The organisation is well-known for developing one of the first union catalogs—the equivalent of a single giant card catalog that combines the cataloging work of many institutions. The RLG Union Catalog (formerly known as RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network)) is an incredibly rich source of information for academic research, with records for 47 million titles in almost 400 languages (the holdings of the National Library of Australia included). Since the Union Catalog is a subscription resource, these records are only easily accessible, for the most part, to library staff and researchers. RedLightGreen began as a glimmer in the eyes of Donald J. Waters, program officer for scholarly communication at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Jim Michalko, president of RLG. In 2001, they posed the question, ‘If the rich data held in the RLG Union Catalog was exposed on the open Web, for a general audience, who would come? What if the average college student could tap into the RLG Union Catalog for their research?’ Thus RedLightGreen was born (www.redlightgreen.com).

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RedLightGreen homepage at www.redlightgreen.com
Courtesy RLG

RedLightGreen is the simple yet powerful interface for the RLG Union Catalog, customised for college undergraduates. It looks like Google, Yahoo or other familiar Web search engines. But it leads students to print materials in their own libraries, and helps them locate significant, authoritative works. It returns results based on relevance and on how many libraries have that book, providing a gauge of the work’s importance. RedLightGreen also lets students check the availability of those works through links to their local library catalogue.

Normally, one would use a specialised system to search a library catalogue—and each catalogue has a different interface, customised for the underlying data structure. For librarians and scholars, these more elaborate interfaces can be very powerful tools; for a general audience, they can be quite frustrating. RedLightGreen uses a familiar interface—a single search box. It makes the research process more student-centric. Instead of having to learn how to use the catalogue, consult a librarian, or take a class, students can get going right away. As in many other fields, the Web browser is quickly becoming the standard interface in the library world for accessing all sorts of information—no matter where it’s located or what format it’s in.

How does RedLightGreen work, compared to a well-known search engine like Google? Google is famous for doing a pretty good job at presenting the user with results that are relevant. It accomplishes this by matching up the user’s exact keywords with Web pages, but it also ranks the results by how widely a site is linked to elsewhere on the Web, thus providing an indication of popularity. Similarly, RedLightGreen ranks books by how well the search terms match the cataloguing, as well as how many libraries own the work. Because the RLG Union Catalog represents holdings from academic and research institutions, a work that is widely held is likely to be credible and relevant, rather than simply popular. Unlike most library catalogues, RedLightGreen groups various editions, translations, and adaptations of a title together, rather than listing them separately. All of the cataloguing that is associated with the various editions lies behind service, giving the simple search box considerable power. The result overview pulls out the most common subject terms that occur in the result, which in turn leads students to other avenues in their research.

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Merrilee Proffitt gives a RedLightGreen demonstration to a Columbia student, 2003
Photograph by Pamela Dewey

After two semesters of use, RedLightGreen has proved to be a valuable tool for meeting undergraduate research needs, according to user studies and anecdotal reports from pilot institutions. It is in active use at those institutions: Princeton University, Columbia University, New York University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. More recently, other institutions have joined as linking partners, among them the California Digital Library, Pennsylvania State University, Rice University, University of Warwick, and Stony Brook University (State University of New York). To date, users have conducted over 130 000 keyword searches.

‘The students I’ve showed it to think it’s great, they find it so easy to use,’ says Nancy Pressman Levy, a general and humanities reference librarian at Princeton University. ‘Their topics are often very convoluted, and their terminology is often esoteric— it’s not always clear what terms to use for searching. So I say to them, “Let’s start in RedLightGreen, and throw in some of your terms, and we’ll see what the official terms are”.’

Between March and April of 2004, RLG did a study to measure the value of RedLightGreen, interviewing 45 students at partnering institutions. Fourteen of the students, or about a third, were graduate students; the rest were undergraduates. In these in-depth conversations, students praised RedLightGreen’s ease of use, and liked how it made the connection between the terms they knew and the terms librarians use. They preferred it to the more complicated search interfaces of their local library catalogues. Some students said that their professors had specifically remarked on the quality of their research resources after they used RedLightGreen.

RedLightGreen was designed for undergraduate research, but graduate students also find it useful. ‘I was pleasantly surprised to hear that RedLightGreen also appealed to graduate students in certain situations,’ says Bob Scott, the head of Electronic Text Service at Columbia University. ‘If they were starting research on an unfamiliar topic, they used it to identify some key literature, selected by the implicit vote of RLG member libraries. Some also found it a useful way to approach a topic that didn’t fit neatly into the Library of Congress subject headings, which don’t always adequately address the questions being examined in this age of interdisciplinary studies.’

RedLightGreen also appeals to a less traditional group of graduate students, Scott says. The school’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies brings people who have left the academic environment back to scholarly research. ‘These continuing students are doing serious research, but they aren’t as familiar with the traditional research tools,’ says Scott. ‘Many of them really took to RedLightGreen and found it a very intuitive way to get started.’

Both Scott and Pressman Levy said that RedLightGreen was also popular among those students creating a bibliography, that standard element of term papers where all the references used in their research are listed. RedLightGreen automatically creates citations in the student’s choice of format: MLA, APA, Chicago, or Turabian.

Speaking from many years of experience as a librarian, Pressman Levy thinks that RedLightGreen points the way to the future. ‘I personally feel that online catalogues of research libraries need to start looking more like RedLightGreen. Most catalogues currently in use have a lot of functionality, but they’re clunky to use. The ease with which you can do keyword searches and get back relevant subject terms in RedLightGreen place it way ahead of local catalogues.’

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Damian McDonald (b.1971)
Jim Michalko, President and CEO, Research Libraries Group (RLG), at the Archiving Web Resources Conference at the National Library in November 2004
Pictures Collection, NL39393

‘Some librarians may say that RedLightGreen lacks fancy search options, just as some say federated searching (cross-database searching) is not good for students,’ she adds. ‘However, the truth of the matter is that our students flock to these types of tools because they don’t want to deal with all the structure that we put on top of the resources.’

As a librarian, Scott says he appreciates the FRBR [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] method of grouping in RedLightGreen, where a work’s editions and translations are summarised in one listing, and wishes that the RLG Union Catalog followed its lead. ‘You get a neater and cleaner list, instead of every instance, which is better if you are just beginning to research a subject.’

And the essential concept of RedLightGreen is very compelling to Scott. ‘I like the idea of getting authoritative, scholarly information out to a wider audience, and lessening the digital divide,’ he says. ‘It’s nice that this service is available to people anywhere on the Web.’

RLG is committed to maintaining RedLightGreen, which was developed with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is currently investigating business models that will ensure its availability as a free service. Institutions are welcome to link to the site and make it available to their students and faculties. Promotional materials for librarians are freely available on the RedLightGreen

MERRILEE PROFITT is a program officer at the Research Libraries Group in the United States. You can reach her at merrilee.proffitt@notes.rlg.org.

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