I've been leading the project known as RedLightGreen since I arrived at RLG in April of 2001. We started off with internal brainstorming sessions, discussing what may be of interest in the Union Catalog to a web audience who did not have access to a library that contributes records. These sessions also introduced me to my co-workers and were the beginning of my education in cataloging.
Since then we've continued on this "marmite" project -- we have bibliographic data, how can we package it to satisfy a need that doesn't undermine the current uses of the data? We recognized that we were all book-loving, data-loving folk -- how representative were our interests, anyway? We'd love to drill down deep into the data, twist projections of it around, come up with a project like mapping the publication of books against a timeline to watch the spread of the press around the globe. That might be a novelty for a large number of folks and fascinating to a few academics, but it wouldn't help us towards creating a site that would become self-sustainable past the grant period.
We've developed RedLightGreen to test the waters of self-sustainability. When we launch at the end of the summer, we will begin observing the use of the system in as much detail as possible in the hopes of improving it and coming to a better understanding of the information seeking behavior of undergraduate.
I'll be writing about the data and analysis here, as well as other design choices as I confront them in the final implementation of the project.
I hope you enjoy reading.
Posted by judielaine at July 20, 2003 09:36 AM