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Accessing Transportation Information Resources Worldwide
St. Petersburg, Florida
July 29th - August 2nd, 2001

Session on Information Resources and Plans
July 30th, 2001, 8:00AM to 10:00 AM

TRL LIBRARY: TRANSPORT INFORMATION DISSEMINATION

Colin Howard
TRL Limited

Colin Howard (Head of Information & Publishing Services, TRL Limited, UK) (Paper presented at the Conference on Accessing Transportation Information Resources Worldwide, 29 July - 2 August 2001, St Petersburg, Florida)

I would like to thank the conference organizers for inviting me to attend this conference and giving me the opportunity to explain how TRL's Information & Publishing Service disseminates transport information in the UK and further afield.

The Transport Research Foundation
First a few words about TRL. Headquartered in Crowthorne, near London. Up until April 1996, TRL was an agency of the UK Government's Department of Transport. On that date TRL entered the private sector as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Transport Research Foundation (a non-profit distributing company without shareholders).
We are the largest UK centre for transport research, with 500 staff and a turnover of 46m$ in 1999/00. Most of our research is still carried out for Government, but a growing proportion is in other sectors too.

TRL is organised into 4 research divisions: I'll just run through each of them and give a few examples of the kind of research they undertake.

Infrastructure Division
Research at TRL on the breakdown mechanisms of our trunk roads and bridges have doubled the potential lifetime of many trunk roads from 20 -40 years

Transportation Division
From the complex software that manages and optimises large traffic light systems in cities as diverse such as London and Bangkok.
Our transport policy model allows politicians to anticipate the results of the decisions they take facilitating answering questions such as "will halving bus fares actually reduce congestion?"

Environment and Safety Division
A multi- modal environmental assessment model allows us to evaluate contributions of various transport modes to CO2 emissions by including the total environmental contribution from each form of transport.
A new high tech road noise measuring equipment can not only measure the noise performance of road surfaces at up to 70 mph, but can also look at the contribution made by tyre design.

Safety has always been central to much of TRL's work, whether it is skid resistant road surfaces, safe junction design, understanding driver behaviour or occupant safety in vehicles.

International Division
Finally TRL is involved in the UK's international aid programme. In Africa roads have to be built using labour intensive methods and local materials.Water is probably the scarcest commodity. Whereas this embankment in Malaysia has to remain stable in annual rainfall measured in metres not centimetres.
Again safety is critical. Around the world around 3/4s of a million people are killed on roads and the record of developing countries is often very poor.

Major facilities
TRL is a centre of scientific excellence and as such much of the work we do is supported by experiment. The equipment we use is large and often unique. Such as the Pavement Test Facility. Our impact test facility accelerates instrumented vehicles into test barriers, bridge parapets or other vehicles at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour, helping us understand how to produce safer specifications.
Our virtual reality simulator is used to do things that would be dangerous on the public roads such as impairment studies on the impact of drink, medicines, drugs or age on driving ability.
Or we can do things that would be prohibitively expensive to do in real life. Trying out a range of new traffic calming methods, or comparisons of different road designs for accident black-spots.

TRL's Mission
When we were privatised after 60 years as a government research laboratory it was important that our staff and our customers understood what our new role was.

So we published our new mission.
Whilst our primary task continued to be to generate new knowledge an element of urgency was added to the process by converting those results into products such as software, hardware, education and training.

I will now turn to the information resources available to users.

TRLs Information & Publishing Services comprises 3 units:

Library & Information Service
Publications Unit
Web Unit

The core services that the Library provides both to TRL researchers and the public are closely linked to our databases and membership of the ITRD system.

Inputs & Outputs
Apologies to those of you who have seen this slide before, but it does demonstrate the way most of our activities revolve around our central in-house databases and our membership of the ITRD system. As you can see as well as inputting details of our own publications to our database we receive abstracts from many other ITRD centres which are consolidated into our database.

(i) Information resources available to TRL Researchers

The TRL Intranet

Since October 2000 TRL has had an Intranet - it is still in the initial stages of its development, the Web Unit is responsible for updating and maintaining the Intranet.

the Library has a major presence on the Intranet with its

"virtual enquiry desk"
Help with the usual Library facilities is available, but special mention should be made of a number if Internet -related resources which have become a possibility since all TRL researchers have had access to the Internet from their desktop.

Journals - we give a listing of all we hold (more than 400 titles) and for a number of them we now have hyperlinks to their full text on several publishers websites.
Also we subscribe to a number of the British Standards full text versions on the Internet and to the Eurofile full text version of European standards published by CEN.

TRL Library Database System

A few words about our databases:
TRACS (Transport Research Abstracting and Cataloguing System) is our principal database comprising some 290,000 records, over 90% of which have abstracts. TRACS goes back to 1972 and can be searched in entirety or the scope can be limited to different groupings of years when records were added.
PROJEX comprises some 12,000 summaries of on-going research - based on ITRD research project records.
TRLINFO contains, as its name suggests, information about TRL

The databases: are available on-line to all TRL staff on their desktop via the network.

Our ITRD input is carried out by the DOC-INPUT programme which has been produced by BASt for all ITRD centres. This produces a CF6 file which we can import into TRACS via a Dataware "Import from CF6" option.

I will now give you a brief flavour of some of the features of the new system:

This search of TRACS went back as far as 1990 and looked for records including the phrase "bicycle helmet" and either the keyword "australia" or the word "netherlands" in the abstract (but not both) and resulted in 13 records being retrieved:
Record no 12 looked like this.

internally the record looks like this in xml format.

and in the CF6 format we use for data exchange for ITRD.

(ii) Information resources available to external users

TRL Publications

Between 50 and 70 new reports are published each year. The overall publications portfolio dates back to 1966, comprises more than 3,400 Research Reports and is a very rich and diverse source of research information, covering over 30 years of work at TRL. The titles of all these reports can be searched on our website (www.trl.co.uk).
Publications are available as one-off purchases, or can be subscribed to. Members of our Research alert Plus scheme receive up to 25% discount. We can supply all reports published since 2000 and often before, electronically as pdf file attachments to an email which will save time and postage costs for overseas customers.

- Publication prices have not risen significantly over the last 3-5 years and we are committed to disseminating information as widely as possible. A significant amount of Publications effort goes into producing low-cost, high quality publications for developing countries.

The Internet and www.trl.co.uk

As ever when I talk about our website I always have to add it is just about to change! At the moment if you go to http://www.trl.co.uk. you will see something like this:

However a major project by external web-designers is nearing completion and within a very short period of time you will see something like this:

For the rest of this presentation I will continue to feature the current web-site - most of the content of which will continue to be available after the launch of the new one.

- The site contains a wealth of information about TRL, its capabilities, and details of many of the current projects and facilities.
Information about TRL software packages can be found here and it is possible to download demo versions.

I mentioned reports previously and our website plays an important role here:
It is possible to mine this rich seam of information by searching all of the titles through the website.
Eg here I am searching for any TRL reports published on the subject of porous asphalt.

Having found a particular report of interest the user can place an order online through the 24 Hour Bookstore where secure payments can be made.

There are also some reports available for free download on the subject of road safety that are sponsored by the UK Government. This trend is likely to continue.
Note we still also will supply a hard copy bound version of these reports as not everyone finds downloading pdf files a speedy or tidy operation.

Research Alert PLUS Membership scheme
As well as receiving on a monthly basis a summary of every new report published, the TRL Annual Review, TRL Journal of Research and various catalogues and indexes, RESEARCH ALERT PLUS members receive:

• 25% saving on all TRL Reports and Current Topics
  
• Review of Transport Research (monthly abstract bulletin in your specific subject area,
  
• 50% saving on database searches
  
• Access to over 400 journals, plus conference series, reference works and standards
  
• Enquiry service and day visits
  
• 200 pages of free photocopying
  
• Subscription rate depends on type and size of organization
  
• Special academic and student memberships available

Enquiry service
The best way to communicate with us is by email at info@trl.co.uk
We can help by:
Identifying which TRL reports are relevant.
Identifying other documents, and their publishers using the ITRD database, directories, and CD collection.
Identifying current UK standards, specifications
And advising on other organisations to contact in the UK, and
providing names and addresses.
Callers requiring a lot of information on a subject ? are
encouraged to purchase a database search or if one of the Current Topics in Transport series covers the subject of interest, would encouraged to buy these.

Most of the above services are limited to members.

On the subject of Loans

We endeavour to assist whenever possible, but do not lend the
following types of material:
TRL reports
Current Topics in Transport
TRL Translations
Whole issues of journals
Conference proceedings

Charging
Loans and photocopies to other ITRD centres ? we operate reciprocally, and these are free, and greatly appreciate the access that ITRD gives to the libraries of the other centres.

With a few exceptions we would not lend documents abroad, and charge $10 per photocopy to be airmailed, to fax we would charge $3?00 per page + $3?00 per item.

Database Products

Literature Searches
We will undertake literature searches of our TRACS and/or PROJEX databases on a paid for basis. We charge an average of $140 per search depending on search complexity and quantity retrieved with a 50% discount available for members. Written/e-mailed requests are best for this.

Review of Transport Research
A monthly Current Awareness (SDI) Service - $280 p.a. (free to RA+ Members)

Current Topics in Transport Series
A selection of abstracts added to the TRL Library database during a specified period (usually the last 2-3 years) on a transport subject of current interest.

Transport databases on CD
A new initiative that was recently launched has taken advantage of the electronic publishing capabilities of Dataware which allows us to provide fully searchable self-contained sub-sets of our database on CD-ROM on topics such as Public Transport; Motorcycle Safety; ITS. Complete databases going back to 1972 are provided and each annual subscription includes a 6 monthly update.
I have a couple of example CDs with me if anyone is interested I can demonstrate them.

TRL's Current and Future Information Issues

Currently we are concentrating on completing the Intranet which will have additional interactive functionality including a web-interface for our databases (which we hope will then be available to external users over the Internet). These mainly IT orientated developments will also allow a knowledge sharing culture to evolve and knowledge management will grow in importance - recognising that our intellectual capital is probably our greatest asset.
As we contemplate moving to a new building on the same Crowthorne site within a few years we really have many challenges to grasp in the KM field as this slide shows!
NB This is not my office!

Thank you for your attention, I hope that you have gained an insight into how TRL Library operates and disseminates transport information.