Wednesday, May 11, 2005

BIG Database of Books : RedLightGreen

On our Internet Starting Points are links to four big bibliographic databases:
RedLightGreen - Research Libraries Group - 45 million titles
Library of Congress catalog - 12 million titles
University of California - 8.5 million titles
WorldCat - 53 million titles
From the point of view of InterLibrary Loan, WorldCat is the one that counts : it's the network of 40,000 libraries that we belong to, from which we can borrow the things you need that the library doesn't own. But you can only get into it from inside the library.
For messing around with at home, and for the sheer delight of its features, try RedLightGreen, the book database of the Research Libraries Group. RLG is only a few dozen libraries, but they are the real big gorillas in the forest--Harvard and Yale, Cornell and Columbia, the British Library and Oxford--and their collections are enormous, and a great joy to fish around in. (If you find what you need, you can get us to borrow it by InterLibrary Loan.)
Why do I love RedLightGreen? 1) Your first results screen will neatly lump together editions for you. (Look up 'thoreau walden'. The first display tells you '307 editions published between 1854 and 2004 in 13 languages' exist in the RLG libraries) 2) It pulls out all the subject and author headings from a list of hits and arrays them down the left side of the screen, so you can choose to narrow your search without having to fish around among the hits. (Look up whales canada'. You get 243 results, too many to pick through. From the subject heading display you choose 'Whaling Arctic Regions' and voila!) 3) If you set up a login, you can tell it what your home library is and get it to search in our catalog to see if we have the book you've found out about, and 4) email yourself citations in one of four formats. 5) They have a Firefox search plugin.
Links to articles about RedLightGreen, including a nifty demo/tutorial from Princeton.

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