Transportation Knowledge Networks: A Management Strategy for the 21st Century -- Special Report 284 (2006)

The transportation sector contributes nearly $340 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), accounting for about 3 percent of the U.S. economy as measured by its value added (BEA 2005).¹ Today’s transportation professionals depend more than ever on timely and reliable information and data² to carry out their work and meet the mission-critical goals of their organizations. Information technology has changed the scale and scope of information available to users, as well as the way that information is accessed and delivered; the Internet and web search engines—such as Google and Yahoo!—now bring information directly to users’ desktops. However, the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming. In addition, transportation researchers and practitioners alike observe that technical reports, even those in digital form, are often difficult to locate and retrieve.

Given the amount of information and data available through the Internet, some transportation agencies are questioning the need for traditional libraries that operate primarily as centralized physical collections, and library budgets are often easy targets for cutbacks.³ In recent years, the

headquarters library at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and several state department of transportation (DOT) libraries have been downsized. Others have been closed or have had to justify their value aggressively. The status of the National Transportation Library (NTL), authorized by Congress in 1998 (intended to be a digital collection only), also is uncertain.

Concerned by the above trends and growing user demand for information services better geared to new technologies, the Standing Committee on Research of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) requested that the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conduct a study to take a fresh look at how transportation information is managed and provided. To date, transportation libraries and other information providers have depended primarily on voluntary, informal contacts for the sharing and distribution of documents—ad hoc arrangements that may change with changes in personnel and funding. Effective management of information requires more consistent institutional arrangements for coordinating resources and sustained funding to ensure the location, identification, accessibility, and preservation of transportation information. Meeting the challenges of the future also requires new strategies for managing information that is increasingly electronic and widely distributed, and for which libraries are but one of many sources for the user.

The expert committee formed by TRB to carry out this study was charged with providing strategic advice to the federal government and the states with regard to a sustainable administrative structure and funding mechanism for meeting the information service needs of the transportation sector. Specifically, the committee was charged to

• Define the core services that need to be provided,

• Identify how they should be provided, and

• Suggest options for funding.

Although the state DOTs that requested the study through AASHTO are the immediate audience for this report, the committee recognized that the study must address the information needs of the broader user

community. In addition to the federal and state agencies involved in transportation, there are more than 600 transit agencies; nearly 400 metropolitan planning organizations; and countless public works officials in thousands of cities, towns, and counties, many supported by private contractors and consultants. Transportation-related private companies and professional associations represent a separate group of users, as do the students and faculty of colleges and universities involved in the education of transportation practitioners and researchers. The information needs of this diverse and decentralized user community extend beyond state and national boundaries as today’s professionals seek to learn from and share with their counterparts around the globe.

This study is not limited to libraries but is focused on the provision of information services generally. Forward-looking librarians are working to improve the identification, collection, production, retrieval, and storage of information in both electronic and paper form. They are also joining with other information providers, as well as information technology and communications professionals, in knowledge management teams that are working to develop systematic approaches for filtering and adding value to the vast quantity of material now available on the World Wide Web so users can rapidly access relevant and reliable information.

The study covers all types of transportation information—from reports and journal articles to conference proceedings—as well as databases and statistical information in both the United States and abroad. The major focus is on the basics, however—on ensuring that narrative information, such as key reports, articles, and conference proceedings, is identified and made available (preferably in electronic form) and remains accessible to major user groups.

Transportation professionals have long recognized the need for a network of information services and users, coordinated at the national level, to enable greater efficiency in the accessing and transfer of technical information generated and used within the transportation community. In 1972, a special committee of the Highway Research Board (HRB)—the

precursor to TRB—first articulated a vision and plan for such a transportation information system (HRB 1972, 1):

The research community was defined broadly to include those involved in transportation administration, planning, engineering, and operation, as well as research and development. The system envisioned would have four main elements (HRB 1973, 2; see Figure 1-1):

• A transportation research community, broadly defined, that generates and uses transportation information;

• Information services that organize and provide access to transportation information;

• A mechanism to provide for coordination among individual services and between services and the user community—a Transportation Research Information System Network (TRISNET); and

• Financial support for information services and network coordination.

In the judgment of the HRB study committee, the most important objectives of TRISNET were to (a) establish and institutionalize a coordinating unit and (b) provide stable and broad-based financial support for compo nents and activities vital to the network.

Although TRISNET was never established, many important elements of that initial vision have been realized. For example, the Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) database, a compilation of abstracts and citations of more than 620,000 records of completed research, has been funded by the state DOTs and administrations of USDOT for more than 35 years. The production and management of this data file is a service TRB provides to its sponsors.⁴ TRIS now contains links to full electronic

documents when available, and major elements of the system have been available on the Internet since 2000 on the website of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).⁵ Another service is the Research in Progress database, a subfile of TRIS, which contains more than 8,000 records of ongoing transportation research projects. TRB also developed a Transportation Thesaurus under National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 20-32, completed in 1996, as a tool to improve and standardize the indexing and retrieval of transportation information. The Thesaurus was adopted by TRB for its indexing activities on TRIS and is maintained and periodically updated by TRB contractors. It is recognized by the Library of Congress and is used by the University Transportation Centers and many state DOTs and academic libraries in applying subject indexing terms to catalogue entries. NCHRP Project 20-70 will provide a web version of the Thesaurus for public use, integrate the Thesaurus into TRIS data entry, and enable TRB to maintain the authoritative version.

Collections of many U.S. transportation libraries are catalogued in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which identifies where a document is located for participating users.⁶ Currently, the headquarters library at USDOT, the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, the TRB library, most college and university libraries, and 20 state DOT libraries participate in OCLC (Baldwin 2004). In 2004 NTL, in cooperation with OCLC and in partnership with the Midwest Transportation Knowledge Network (MTKN) (see below), launched a special online catalogue of the collections of transportation libraries only (TLCat), which enables users to search multiple transportation library holdings in a single catalogue. Twenty-three transportation libraries plus NTL are now participating.⁷

Congress authorized USDOT to establish and maintain NTL—a collection of statistical and other information needed for transportation deci-

sion makers at the federal, state, and local levels—in 1998. Its mission is to improve access to and sharing of transportation data and information and to coordinate transportation libraries and other transportation information providers, both public and private, in that endeavor [Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, Title V, Section 5109(e)]. Intended to be a digital collection of noncopyrighted research reports, NTL provides the following core services: a small digital collection of documents and websites, publication of a sizable portion of TRIS on the web as TRIS Online, reference services, and sponsorship of TLCat and its provision to the public free of charge.

NTL has also provided seed funds to catalyze the creation of regional networks of libraries to catalogue and share resources. What later became known as MTKN was begun in December 2001 as a pilot project to develop a consortium of regional libraries in the states making up Region 3 of AASHTO (plus South Dakota) to share information resources and improve access to transportation collections for member organizations. NTL provided approximately $300,000 over 2 years to support the following activities: finance one part-time staff member (for 1 year) to help set up the consortium, finance two annual meetings for consortium members, help fund TLCat, and support OCLC membership fees for member libraries (see Box 1-1). NTL continues to pay membership fees in OCLC/ TLCat for most consortium members, but other NTL support has ceased. The Midwest libraries have continued to operate on their own, establishing MTKN as a nonprofit organization and providing the nucleus of what could become a group of similar regional networks throughout the nation (A. Mathison, Information Services Committee Meeting, TRB Annual Meeting, January 2005).

Finally, a state pooled-fund project on Transportation Library Connectivity has been launched to (a) provide technical assistance to participating state agencies on cataloguing documents for use in OCLC and converting them to online formats and (b) develop tools for collaboration

and marketing of information resources.⁸ Ten state DOTs and one University Transportation Center are participating.⁹

Over the years, the Transportation Division of the Special Libraries Association has also offered librarians the opportunity for professional networking. Founded in 1943, the Transportation Division currently has more than 200 member librarians from universities, corporations, and government who meet annually and sponsor periodic projects (e.g., publication of a directory of transportation libraries).

Despite the above initiatives, the primary objectives articulated by HRB in 1972 for a mechanism to coordinate information services and provide stable funding for that purpose have not been met; transportation information providers continue to operate on the basis of ad hoc institutional and funding arrangements. Access to technical reports has improved but continues to be a problem nonetheless. For example, an update of an earlier study of the availability of technical reports in TRANSPORT—a major bibliographic database that comprises TRIS plus international holdings—found that 11 percent of the citations could not be located in libraries within the United States or Canada in the OCLC database or through the National Technical Information Service (B. Osif, personal communication, September 2005). This percentage is down from 37 percent in the 1996 study (Osif 2000, 14) but in the judgment of the author still represents a significant number.¹⁰ Moreover, more than half of state DOTs do not participate in OCLC (Baldwin 2004). Hence they may not make their reports available to others¹¹ or have ready access to documents and reports of other state DOTs or other libraries except through state libraries (for some states) or ad hoc arrangements.¹² For example, the two major transportation libraries at Northwestern University and the University of California-Berkeley will lend to non-OCLC libraries, but their primary mission is to serve their respective academic communities, not transportation libraries across the nation.

NTL could have been the nucleus of the national transportation information system envisioned by HRB in the early 1970s. Without stable funding and support at USDOT, however, NTL has been able to operate only within a narrow definition of its mission, and its current status is uncertain. Its parent organization—BTS—has been moved to a new entity, the Research and Innovative Technology Administration. However, funding for BTS was reduced by 27 percent in the recent reauthorization of surface transportation programs, with as yet unknown implications for the initiatives and funding of NTL. For example, MTKN has continued without federal support, but without NTL seed funding, network development in other regions is proceeding slowly if at all.

The headquarters library at USDOT likewise has not taken a leadership role. It views its primary mission as serving USDOT staff and the modal operating administrations located at the headquarters building. Since the mid-1990s, the library has been downsizing, and its collection has been available to off-site users (including USDOT facilities such as the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center) through interlibrary loans only. The library considers itself a lender of last resort.

Many libraries serving state DOTs have one full-time equivalent or less professional staff; two-thirds have annual operating budgets below $15,000 (Baldwin 2004). Other major transportation collections, such as those of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the American Trucking Associations, were closed some time ago. An additional concern is the likely retirement of unprecedented numbers of senior state transportation agency staff, who will take long-accumulated knowledge with them. More than 50 percent of the state DOT workforce will be eligible to retire in the next 10 years, more than double the rate for the nation’s entire workforce (TRB 2003, 3).

More generally, as compared with other major sectors of the economy such as health and agriculture, which support national libraries and broad networks of information providers, the transportation sector devotes relatively few resources to information services (see Figure 1-2). For example, current funding for NTL and TRIS represents 0.0007 percent of the transportation sector’s share of GDP—far short of the 0.04 percent and 0.02 percent share devoted by health and agriculture, respectively, to support the National Library of Medicine and

FIGURE 1-2 Comparison of 2005 budgets for selected national libraries and related information services with industry contributions to GDP. (NAL = National Agricultural Library; NLM = National Library of Medicine.) (Source: Budget estimates, library directors; GDP estimates, BEA 2005.)

the National Agricultural Library and their associated information services.¹³

Declining budgets for many traditional transportation library collections and library closures provided an important impetus for this study. The institutional building blocks for transportation information network

development in many U.S. regions—knowledgeable library and information professionals and the enabling infrastructure and technology—are at best unevenly funded. Libraries and other information providers need more than ever to coordinate and share resources and set priorities for the provision of information services. They also need new strategies for managing diffuse information that now reaches users from many different sources in addition to the library. Materials must still be identified and located, but they must also be managed so users can access and retrieve reliable and accurate information. New information technologies offer opportunities for organizing and delivering information in new ways. Forward-looking librarians are working with other information professionals to exploit these technologies so as to better manage and add value to the flood of information reaching users.

The web and Internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, have revolutionized the way information is identified and accessed. Large numbers of users, transportation professionals among them, search on line as their first and sometimes sole means of accessing information. For example, a 2003 survey of the directors of University Transportation Centers found that web-based resources and online catalogues were considered most important in conducting transportation research (LIST 2003).¹⁴ A recent survey by the Pew Foundation found that the vast majority of Internet searchers were satisfied with their searches and searching skills (Fallows 2005). Nevertheless, relatively few searchers (one out of six) could distinguish between sponsored (i.e., paid-for) and unsponsored search results, and approximately half of Internet users reported searching no more than a few times a week and said they could return to more traditional ways of

finding information (Fallows 2005, i).¹⁵ Information literacy has become an issue as users must be able to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and use information effectively across a range of media. This requires skills in using technology, communication networks, and electronic resources.

Ready access to online information may help explain the closure or downsizing of some traditional libraries. Cost-conscious managers ask why the personnel costs and space requirements of running a library are necessary when users can simply summon up the information they require at their desktops. In the absence of a convincing case for the value of library professionals and services, many libraries are viewed as costly line items and easy targets for budgetary cutbacks (Osif 2004).

How are librarians and information professionals responding to these challenges? Many are reinventing themselves. In some settings, particularly corporations, physical libraries are being replaced by a virtual library or libraries, but staff still organize and host content for users (Outsell 2004) (see Box 1-2). In other settings, forward-looking librarians are joining with other information providers and information technology and communications professionals and reaching out to users—marketing themselves as sophisticated human search engines who can add value by assisting users in locating the information they need and keeping them abreast of the latest developments in their fields (Brody 2004) (see Box 1-3). A recent environmental scan conducted by OCLC of issues and trends affecting libraries, museums, archives, and related organizations summarized several key changes in the way librarians and other information professionals view their role (OCLC 2003):

• Service provision: Libraries are evolving from centralized locations of physical collections to service providers that make information services available to users wherever they reside.

• User orientation: Libraries are focusing less on cataloguing and collections than on reaching out to users to determine their information needs and the best ways of meeting those needs.

• Knowledge management: Librarians and information professionals view themselves as adding value by turning information into useful

knowledge and by working collaboratively to coordinate information services and deliver them to different user groups.

• Professional capacity development: Information provision no longer stops with the collection and distribution of transportation materials but involves educating users in how to identify and access relevant information, as well as keeping librarians and information professionals abreast of advances in their field.

• Marketing and communications: Librarians and information professionals are becoming more proactive, raising awareness of the role of libraries and available information services, increasing the visibility of library and information professionals, and demonstrating the value of their services.

One of the primary complaints of transportation librarians and information professionals today is a lack of appreciation of the value of information in general and of libraries as information providers in particular, especially on the part of top managers who hold the purse strings. Like research, good information is often taken for granted, and its benefits are not always evident. The services offered by librarians—reference and research, document retrieval from international sources, literature reviews, collection development, full-text article retrieval, and other subscription services—are frequently not known. This is particularly true at the leadership level; turnover among CEOs of state DOTs is high, and many top managers are unaware of the role played by librarians or information professionals in the highly filtered information they receive. Similarly, researchers and practitioners may overlook or bypass the library, particularly when users must come to a central location to access information.

As noted, librarians and information professionals are responding by becoming more proactive, moving beyond the reference desk to offer information to users and add value by synthesizing and repackaging that information on the basis of user interests and expertise. (Box 1-4 provides several examples of information identified and synthesized by librarians and information professionals that has proven of value, and in some cases has contributed to significant cost reductions, for state DOTs.) User interests and competency in accessing information, however, can vary widely. For example, transportation researchers are often adept at using the web to conduct literature searches. They may look to the library for access to electronic journals and full-length reports and for updates on new reports in their fields of interest. Transportation practitioners, by comparison, are often less likely to spend time on computer searches. Compared with scientists, for example, engineers rely more on internal reports

and interpersonal and informal means of communication than on written professional materials (Tenopir and King 2004).¹⁶ Engineers may look to the library for abstracts of relevant research reports and syntheses of best practices, as well as regulations and design codes that are digested, packaged, and readily accessible through desktop website portals.

Librarians are also joining together with information technology and communications professionals as embedded members of research and project teams to broaden their visibility as knowledge managers and integral partners in meeting the mission-critical goals of their organizations (King 2004) (see Box 1-5). When libraries become part of a broader research and knowledge management group, they may have a better chance of securing resources than when they appear as a budget line item.¹⁷

Finally, librarians and information professionals are attempting to counter management concerns about the cost of managed information services by identifying the costs in user time and efficiency of not having well-organized information resources. To do so, they must be skilled in both quantifying the value of information services and increasing their own visibility. As an example, the Wisconsin DOT research and library staff now ask users who have requested syntheses of current research and best practices on a specific topic to complete a brief survey quantifying the benefits thus derived, if possible, and specifying ways in which the information may have led to improved practices and savings in time, money, and even lives.

The remainder of this report considers how, in a rapidly changing environment, transportation libraries and information professionals can best organize and fund themselves to meet user needs. In Chapter 2, models for managing information services in other sectors are reviewed. Drawing on this experience, the committee presents its proposal for a system of transportation knowledge networks served by a national-level coordinating structure and identifies core functions and services for both. In Chapter 3, the characteristics necessary for successful operation of the proposed coordinating structure are defined, the pros and cons of alternative institutional arrangements are discussed, and a recommendation is made for locating the coordinating structure and providing a suitable governance arrangement. Finally, Chapter 4 reviews funding options for the coordinating structure and the transportation knowledge networks, proposes a funding strategy, and ends with a brief discussion of next steps.

BEA Bureau of Economic Analysis

FHWA Federal Highway Administration

HRB Highway Research Board

LIST Committee on Library and Information Science for Transportation

MTKN Midwest Transportation Knowledge Network

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.

TRB Transportation Research Board

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