Did i mention we promoted a new interface, with a new "cool" feature called "Your List?" The "Your List" feature is why we prompted for a default citation format -- something that didn't make sense in the registration flow before this. The "Your List" is something other folks had asked for -- we wish we had it in place at launch.
The colors are brighter -- "younger" -- too.
And we updated the data right before ALA. As RLG migrates the full Union Catalog to a new infrastructure, our ability to add new records into RedLightGreen in a sensible manner is hampered by a cascade of dependencies and priorities. As soon as the Union Catalog is in its new home, i hope we'll be able to make a more sensible connection to the continually updated records. Until then, we'll have to make do with these batch loads.
Did i mention i had the flu?
Posted by judielaine at February 4, 2004 10:38 AM | TrackBackRe Your list: What about offering BibTeX output in the 'your list' feature (or for individual titles as well). That would make it easy to copy bibliographical information into a local database that can be used when writing. (Of course the same would be nice for other file formats, I suppose, but as I am using BibTeX personally...)
BTW, is there a way to sort search results by date or by author name? I saw it's possible in my list but couldn't find the option on the search results page.
We've considered some more "common" formats for bibliography extraction, and we may add it at some point. Most RLG cutomers are in the humanities and social sciences, though, and so BibTeX would likely not be supported. I'd insist we had a CSV format as well as the proprietary formats considered "common."
RLG does provide this feature in our commercial resource, Eureka. I initially thought we could just copy the same code over, but since RedLightGreen is built on a proprietary representation of MARC in XML* and Eureka is built directly on MARC, it would have to be two code bases. As we migrate the full database and then the applications like Eureka to XML, we'll be able to merge.
Shouldn't a simple stylesheet be a trivial thing? I think so, but apparently the commercial citation formats have historically required much care and feeding. (Insert grumble about proprietary systems and the virtue of Open systems, standards, and sources.) I have to admit, just developing the style sheets for generating the citations themselves have been trick as library delimited and marked up data originates from rather different rules and principles than citations.
We are disinclined to consider an export format *mainly* because all the students we have put through usability testing have expressed no interest in using a software package to manage citations. The target audience just doesn't care. Our "scholarly" audience is expected to use Eureka.
As far as the sorting goes, this* post about sorting by date applies here as well. We may eventually change the search engine used for author and title searches in which case sorting by author and title may become more sensible.
* http://www.grey-cat.com/tunabreath-arch/2004/01/15/sorting_by_date_vs_limit_to_recent.html
Posted by: Judith at February 4, 2004 01:23 PMI didn't realise RLG was intended for undergrads only. Instead I am inclined to think about it as 'Google for books', being easy to use and doing a fairly good job at grouping things as you wish it did.
Re Sorting: I guess limiting the search on recent books will do the trick as far as sorting by date is concerned.
Posted by: ssp at February 5, 2004 11:40 AM