RedLightGreen was a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

bibliographic Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliograph ...

descriptions on the

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

created by Research Libraries Group (RLG). It used a set of four million records extracted from

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

database, and was designed to help novice users make selections from the vast bibliographic resources they would encounter in such a large set. RedLightGreen also allowed users to create

citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...

s for works found. Work on RedLightGreen began in 2001 with funding from the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, commonly known as the Mellon Foundation, is a New York City-based private foundation with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969 merger ...

. It was one of the earliest experiments with the

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR ) is a conceptual entity–relationship model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) that relates user tasks of retrieval and access in onlin ...

which provides a structured view of bibliographic data. On 1 July 2006, RLG was merged with

, and it was announced that the RedLightGreen service would be replaced by

, via Open WorldCat, available at WorldCat.org."RLG to combine with OCLC"
(Press Release, Dublin, Ohio, USA, 3 May 2006)

References

External links

Open WorldCat site
Library 2.0 Bibliographic databases and indexes {{Library-stub