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.
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