Searching RedLightGreen

Searching for Library Books with RedLightGreen
By Gary Price, News Editor
October 31, 2005

Google Scholar isn't the only online service that can help you track down and
read scholarly or academic books and other content. The oddly named
RedLightGreen is a powerful and highly useful alternative.

RedLightGreen is an easy-to-use search service designed to help you find and
access library books, developed by RLG, a library organization based in
California. This database is what librarians call a "union catalog" and
contains bibliographic information for more than 120 million books. But it also
includes plenty of other impressive features.

For example, here's a search for "Internet History". The result page not only
contains a list of hits but lots of help to help you narrow and focus your
results. Look in the column on the left side of the page.

Here you'll find options to focus your search to a specific subject. Where do
these subject links come from? They're from the subject headings that have been
assigned to the books in your results list by human catalogers, using a
controlled vocabulary called Library of Congress Subject Headings. Taking
advantage of subject headings/descriptors can often allow you to find just the
right material very quickly.

You'll also see a clickable list of all of the authors in the results list. And
if you want to limit your search to a certain language, it's only a click away.

An advanced search interface with a few more search options is also available.

Once you have a list of books, now what? Let's look at a page for a specific
title.

Note the green box in the upper right side of the page labeled, "Get it at your
library." If you click this link, you can quickly check if a specific library
holds the item with just one click. In fact, RLG just added direct links to
THOUSANDS MORE local library catalogs around world. If you register (free and
fast), your own local library will always be linked and listed (it's still easy
to check others).

Another green box on the right side of the page provides links to create a list
of saved items. You can also format the list into one of four bibliographic
formats. This makes it easy to send the bibliography via email or print it.

Result pages also contain a link to find the item (if available) in the
Amazon.com database, along with links from Google.

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3560121

Ali Boutaqmanti
HCL Widener Library
MED