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Transport Information sources in Australia and New Zealand: The Role of Libraries and the Tranzinfo Group.
A Pentecost, J. Jensen and F. Capurro
Introduction
Members of the transport community who need information have a variety of sources
through which they can gain access to that information. This applies equally
to practitioners, administrators and researchers, and to people in road transport,
rail transport, aviation and the maritime field.
Sometimes the source of information is close at hand: a paper in the proceedings of a professional conference; a phone call to a trusted colleague; a well thumbed reference book from one's personal collection; internet discussion lists; searches of the World Wide Web.
Other sources from which transport professionals may gather information include state transport authority seminars and training sessions; memberships of professional organisations such as the Institute of Transportation Engineers; or international conferences such as the PIARC Congress or the European PTRCs.
Transport Libraries
Beyond these information sources, there is a rich array of library-based information
at the disposal of the entire transport community. This library network has
been in existence for many years and has kept pace with advances in technologies,
information requirements and changes in the transport sector itself.
The six Australian state road or transport authorities have all had libraries for many years, primarily serving the authorities' own staff with information concerning technical and administrative matters. The Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory governments now also have libraries for their transport staff.
A number of other organisations also have longstanding libraries with relevant material; these organisations include the University of Adelaide's Road Accident Research Unit, the Roadwatch unit at the University of Western Australia, Sinclair Knight Merz, Opus International Consultants, Air Services Australia, and specialist engineering libraries in several universities.
Historical Perspective
When in the 1940s Caleb Grafton Roberts of the Victorian Country Roads Board
recommended the establishment of an Australian road research centre, he specified
that this centre ought to have a librarian on the staff. Roberts envisaged an
organisation responsible for "the initiation and coordination of research
by the various State organizations, [ ...] the collection and analysis of results,
and the publication and distribution of reports" (Roberts 1948, p.8). In
the early 1960s, the first years of the existence of the then Australian Road
Research Board, this library served the research staff, but its role soon evolved
into a much broader one.
In 1971, a meeting of the National Association of Australian State Road Authorities (NAASRA, now Austroads) "requested that ARRB convene a meeting of the librarians of the State Road Authorities, ARRB and the Commonwealth Bureau of Roads to consider cataloguing systems and inter-library cooperation" (Bayes 1976, p.1). At the inaugural meeting of librarians, a decision was made to develop a national index to road-related literature printed or published in Australia. Production of the Australian Road Index (ARI) was coordinated by ARRB. Whilst the majority of records in the Index were provided by ARRB, to ensure a comprehensive coverage, the State and Commonwealth government road authority libraries also provided input.
ARRB hosted annual meetings of the librarians to discuss not only issues involving ARI but other issues of importance to the profession as well as initiatives to foster further cooperation.
In addition to ARI, there were two other databases available which indexed information in the road and transport subject areas. The Bureau of Transport Economics developed the Australian Transport Literature Information System (ATLIS) which was a very useful index to transport related information whilst the Federal Office of Road Safety made publicly available their database, LASORS (Literature Analysis System, Office of Road Safety). LASORS was later incorporated into the ROAD database, which is discussed in more detail below.
The transport libraries whose fields of specialisation were public transport, rail, aviation or maritime also developed a cooperative network and produced a directory of transport libraries in Australia (TRANSLIB Directory 1988). With the amalgamation of some government road and transport authorities in the late 1980s, TRANSLIB, a network of librarians with an interest in road and transport information, was established.
Tranzinfo Today
TRANSLIB is now called TRANZINFO, the change in name reflecting the Trans-Tasman
composition of the group. Its members number in the dozens and come not only
from the transport authorities but from a spectrum of organisations as diverse
as the Aviation Information Centre, the Orbital Engine Company, the Port of
Brisbane Corporation, Sinclair Knight Merz, and the Land Transport Safety Authority
in New Zealand. TRANZINFO's subject coverage spans road, rail, air and sea,
as well as intermodal issues and concepts.
TRANZINFO members meet each year to plan cooperative ventures, assign TRANZINFO tasks to particular people or organisations, and discuss issues of common interest. Cooperative initiatives include a directory of member libraries available online at http://www.transport.sa.gov.au/tranzinfo/welcome.shtml and hosted by Transport SA (South Australia), detailing the strengths of each collection and a combined listing of journal titles held by member libraries (Beaumont 2001). These two tools facilitate the kinds of cooperative sharing of information and resources that have long characterised TRANZINFO, and are well used by members. TRANZINFO also produced a list of transport related Internet sites for delegates at the 1998 Australasian Transport Research Forum Conference in Sydney.
Products & Services
All TRANZINFO libraries offer reference and information services. In
some cases, these services are available only to the staff of the organisation
of which the library is a part. In other cases, the services are made available
to the general public either on a fee-for-service or subscription basis, or
sometimes under an "open door" policy that allows members of the public
to use the service by visiting or by making enquiries via the telephone or e-mail.
With the enormous explosion of information, both in print and electronic forms, the librarian plays an important role in identifying and meeting information needs. TRANZINFO members are not limited to the traditional roles of librarians but are at the forefront of the rapidly changing information environment. Their training ensures that they are in an excellent position to promote and exploit the benefits of new technologies, such as Internet, offering their clients improved access to the masses of information now available. Moreover, librarians are experts in proactive information gathering, with many TRANZINFO members collecting press clippings, ministerial media releases, conference publicity or the URL addresses of interesting Web sites.
Transport librarians have access to a wide range of sources and materials. An enquiry from a client can entail the traditional library tasks of literature searches and document delivery but it may also involve the provision of information by other means such as person-to-person referral or Web searching. Librarians also know when to go beyond their own resources and tap into the resources of their TRANZINFO colleagues. An important advantage of the TRANZINFO network is that in many cases there is a free exchange of information between members.
A skill that librarians have acquired in recent years is that of distinguishing between paper-based information and digital information on the basis of cost-effectiveness as well as the usefulness of content. The amount of time and money that can be saved in having a professional librarian carry out a database search or Web search on behalf of a transport professional cannot be underestimated.
The following is a list of the major sources of information that are used by (and in some cases created by) the TRANZINFO member libraries. Some of these sources are only available from libraries but others are available by direct subscription.
Current awareness bulletins
The successor to ARI is TARU (Transport and Road Update), a "current awareness
bulletin" produced by the staff at the Library at ARRB Transport Research.
Each monthly issue contains approximately 350 bibliographic records corresponding
to the materials that have recently been added to the ARRB Library's collection.
TARU contains not only records for books and reports, but also detailed references
to joumal articles and conference papers. It has more than 400 subscribers and
is available as a paper magazine or as an electronic file that can be sent to
subscribers via e-mail. TARU serves the transport library community by alerting
other librarians to the existence of important publications, which they can
choose to purchase for their own collection or request on interloan from the
ARRB Library. In addition, it enables subscribers without their own library
to keep up to date with published transport sources, which they can request
from ARRB's document delivery service.
Most libraries produce their own current awareness bulletins, although TARU is arguably the most comprehensive in road and land transport terms. Many TRANZINFO libraries make their own bulletins available to other member libraries, enabling them to keep abreast of printed sources in specific subject areas.
ATRI
ATRI (Australian Transport Index) is a comprehensive bibliographic database
incorporating the monthly TARU records and ARRB's library catalogue. Records
are also contributed by several TRANZINFO members, chiefly the Federal Transport
Library, the New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority , Main Roads Queensland,
RACV, the University of Adelaide's Road Accident Research Unit, the Tasmanian
Transport Library, VicRoads and Main Roads Western Australia.
Because of the large number of records submitted to ARRB by participating TRANZINFO libraries, and the large range of materials that are accessioned into ARRB's Library collection, the ATRI database is a very useful one. Its content has an Australian bias, but it also has good coverage of materials from New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and other countries such as South Africa, Finland and Sweden. It has a road transport and road engineering bias due to its origins in the then Australian Road Research Board, but its coverage of other modes and other technologies and issues has broadened a great deal in recent years.
ATRI can be accessed from many libraries and is also publicly available by subscription to either the Informit Engineering and Applied Science CD- ROM or the Informit Online Web site.
International databases
ITRD (International Transport Research Documentation) (formerly IRRD) is a bibliographic
database containing citations to the worldwide literature and current research
on all aspects of road research, transport and traffic planning. In the late
1990s, the ITRD subject areas have moved beyond the strict road transport field,
into intermodal and environmental research. The database has been in existence
since 1972 as one of the major activities of the OECD's Directorate for Science,
Technology and Industry. Each year since 1977 (Bayes 1976, p.7) ARRB has submitted
entries of Australian (and, recently, New Zealand) origin for inclusion in the
database.
Another major international transport database is TRIS (the Transportation Research Information Services). TRIS is produced by the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., using records contributed by several major American transport libraries, and its coverage extends to all modes and issues.
ITRD and TRIS, like ATRI, are available to the public by subscription. ITRD can be searched via the database host STN, based in Karlsruhe in Germany, and TRIS is one of many databases on the Dialog host, based in North Carolina, USA; Dialog can be searched through direct dial-up or via the Dialog Web site. In addition, TRIS and ITRD are merged to create the TRANSPORT CD-ROM, which is marketed internationally by the SilverPlatter company and contains more than 650,000 records. Many TRANZINFO libraries have access to ITRD and TRIS in at least one format.
World Interchange Network
An important international venture in recent years has been the World Interchange
Network (WIN), which was originally established on an initiative of PIARC. WIN
is a global knowledge exchange network which aims to solve transport-related
problems by putting people in touch in with others who may have the knowledge
and expertise to assist. It is a global federation of "relays", people
and organisations who act as contact points to handle questions and referrals
on topics of interest to the transport community. A relaye was set up in the
Library at ARRB Transport Research in 1995 (Pentecost 1997, p.9). Practitioners,
administrators and researchers from Australia and New Zealand now have a new
and very successful means of gaining access to knowledge from other WIN member
countries such as Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Finland and France.
Other sources
In addition to the sources listed above, there are a large number of other databases
and information sources to which TRANZINFO librarians have access.
The Kinetica database contains information on books and serials held by many of Australia's libraries. This database greatly facilitates resource sharing through the national interlibrary loans system, and enables TRANZINFO members to provide their clients with published materials in subject areas in which many transport libraries cannot afford to collect in great depth (for example, psychology , management or information technology).
Similarly, the large database hosts such as Dialog contain information on an array of topics. These databases are able to provide clients with bibliographic references, abstracts, full-text papers, and other content such as corporate financial data or country-by-country statistical summaries.
There is also a wealth of quality information available on the Internet. Transport sites include the University of California at Berkeley's PATH, a bibliographic database pertaining to intelligent transport systems, and catalogues from libraries in organisations such as the Road Accident Research Unit and the United States Department of Transportation Library. In addition, many organisations and government bodies such as the Bureau of Transport Economics, the Department of Environment, Transport and The Regions in the United Kingdom, and the United States Department of Transport, provide selected full-text publications.
TRANZINFO members regularly use many Web sites that are not primarily on transport-related topics – for example, the library catalogues of Monash University and the University of Sydney, and the local and international news sites. Librarians critically evaluate and recommend useful Internet sites to clients, and are expert at retrieving Web-based information on behalf of clients.
Conclusion
The history of cooperation amongst transport librarians in Australia and New
Zealand is a long one. The wide range of products and services that they produce,
together and separately, and to which they have access, is a vital resource
which all transport professionals should bear in mind. Although the early history
of TRANSLIB is not one that is shared by all of today's TRANZINFO member libraries,
the current situation is one of collaboration and resource sharing across transport
mode specialisations and across the Tasman. This collaboration is indispensable
in a climate where both finding a way through the vast information maze, and
saving money through minimising duplication and timely delivery, are paramount.
References
ARRB TRANSPORT RESEARCH. (1999). Guide to Libraries with Transport Collections
in Australia and New Zealand. (ARRB Transport Research: Vermont South, Victoria).
BAYES, M. (1976). The Australian Road Index: Past and Future. ARRB Internal
Report AIR 000-36. (Australian Road Research Board: Vermont South, Victoria).
BEAUMONT, L. (compiler) (1994). TRANSLIB Union List of Periodicals. (Australian
Road Research Board: Vermont South, Victoria).
PENTECOST, A. (1997). World Interchange Network: the
Australasian Node at ARRB Transport Research. REAAA Newsletter, June 1997, pp8-11.
ROBERTS, C.G. (1948). Chief Engineer's Visit Abroad, 1947: Report. (Country
Roads Board: Kew, Victoria).
TRANSUB Directory. (1988). (No publisher).
Abbreviations
ARRB Australian Road Research Board (known as ARRB Transport Research since
1995)
NTIS The United States National Technical Information Service
PIARC Formerly the Permanent International Association of Road Congresses, now
known as the World Road Association (PIARC)
PTRC Planning and Transport Research and Computation
RACV Royal Automobile Club of Victoria
URL Uniform Resource Locator (World Wide Web address)
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Reproduced and updated from Road and Transport Research, December 1999, Vol.8 No.4, by kind permission of Rosa Serratore on behalf of ARRB
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