RedLightGreen... Have You Tried It?

RedLightGreen

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2004. "The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google" (subscription required), by Steven J. Bell:

Another interesting experiment is the "RedLightGreen" project, recently made public by RLG, a nonprofit group of more than 160 universities, national libraries, archives, historical societies, and other institutions. That interface presents users with a single search box, similar to Google's. But the initial-results screen includes a list of books and suggests other search terms from the database's subject vocabulary that, if selected, could lead to more-relevant material. RedLightGreen ranks books and other material according to relevance and to how many libraries own the material, thus combining the use of a subject vocabulary with a Google-like popularity measure.

Both RedLightGreen and ProQuest now allow users to put information about the material they find on the interfaces into any of several standard citation formats.