We've been admirers and very frequent users of RLG's RedLightGreen since it went live in 2003. This union catalog from RLG was powerful but very easy to use. An ideal tool for its primary audience, undergrad students. It offered a great set of features including direct links to local library catalog, bibliographic formatting, and useful tools to narrow and focus your search. Plus, it was led by RLG's Merrilee Proffit who was not only the perfect spokesperson but who also played a major role in the development of the service in the first place.
Online public access catalogs are a dime-a-dozen. Very good ones are few-and-far between. Excellent union catalogs are very rare. RedLightGreen (RLG) is definitely one of the rare ones.
Instead of rehashing what we wrote a few weeks ago, we'll point out one Worldcat.org feature that RLG does better, refinements. Run a search on both services.
The authors from WorldCat include United States and National Association.... Not very helpful. RLG's refinements in our opinion would be more useful to the typical user.
The content category in WorldCat is very weak in comparison (in our opinion) to the subject refinements at RLG, especially if you click the see more results link.
The format refinements on OCLC are good. But they need to have some sort of definition or mouse-over to explain them.
Finally, likely a glitch, but RLG offers many more language refinements with far fewer results than Worldcat.org does.
Our hope is by the time RLG goes offline, Worldcat.org will have made some significant improvements and hopefully surpass the quality that RedLightGreen offered. We reviewed Worldcat.org several weeks ago and it has a long way to go. But that's what beta is all about. We will be watching very closely.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
