RedLightGreen closing
One of my first posts here was about RedLightGreen as an example of semi-FRBRization. RedLightGreen was done by RLG, which merged with OCLC a few months ago. It’s not unexpected that OCLC is closing down RedLightGreen, because they do similar things in WorldCat.
Here’s a quote from the announcement sent out by Merrilee Proffitt of OCLC:
When we evaluated RedLightGreen against WorldCat.org, it was clear that the two services were very closely aligned in terms of features, and that it would be a waste of resources to maintain and improve both services in tandem with one another. The only key feature that distinguished RedLightGreen from WorldCat.org was citation formatting, and the WorldCat.org development team quickly acknowledged that this feature would be a useful addition to WorldCat.org and are working quickly to make this feature available. Below is an overview of RedLightGreen features, and how they are covered in WorldCat.org.
- FRBRization of results: RedLightGreen uses a FRBR-like approach to group works in RedLightGreen. OCLC is already employing a similar FRBR-like approach in Open WorldCat. Grouping of works is slightly different than in RedLightGreen; for example, titles in different languages are treated as separate works.
With only one system to run, I hope all the people doing FRBR work at OCLC can take the best bits of RedLightGreen and roll out some exciting new stuff.
There’s some talk about this on the new Talking with Talis podcast, titled RedLightGreen Gang, and FRBR and WikiCat come up in the chat.