From RLG, an international not-for-profit organization of libraries, museums, and other research institutions comes this incredibly cool tool, RedLightGreen, that makes me feel a little ripped off that it wasn’t around when I was in college. Start with a vague query, such as “painting”, and you’ll be returned a very thorough, very logically organized list [...]

From RLG, an international not-for-profit organization of libraries, museums, and other research institutions comes this incredibly cool tool, RedLightGreen, that makes me feel a little ripped off that it wasn’t around when I was in college.

Start with a vague query, such as “painting”, and you’ll be returned a very thorough, very logically organized list of search limiters that will help you zero in on the resources you’re looking for. Though many library catalogs are created to make life easier for librarians rather than the users (a rant on that here), this user interface is darn near impeccable.

Once you get your results, you can check availability at your local library and automatically generate citations using standard bibliography formats such as MLA, APA, and Chicago. This is a huge timesaver and a much better alternative than the method I remember from my college days – jotting down information on the margins of random scraps of paper, only to lose them come crunch time.

From MetaFilter comes a link to the blog of one of the people involved in the project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Search: Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.