> OIP Home > Return to Previous > Information Resources, Information Services and Information Management

Accessing Transportation Information Resources Worldwide
St. Petersburg, Florida
Sunday, July 29, 2001 - 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

INFORMATION RESOURCES, INFORMATION SERVICES AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AT THE KURATORIUM FUER VERKEHRSSICHERHEIT (KfV)
[AUSTRIAN ROAD SAFETY BOARD]

Karin Haid
Kuratorium fuer Verkehrssicherheit (KfV)
Austria

1. Mission and responsibilities of the Kuratorium fuer Verkehrssicherheit (KfV)

KfV is a private institution engaged in accident research and accident prevention. It was founded in 1959 on the initiative of the Austrian automobile clubs and the association of the Austrian insurance companies. The reason for the founding of KfV was the exorbitant number of fatalities and people injured in traffic accidents as a consequence of the booming mass motorization of the fifties. The high costs for insurers and the national economy resulting from these accidents called for action. There was a wish to have an institution whose sole task should be to elaborate appropriate , scientifically based measures for accident prevention and the enhancement of road safety.

KfV's work has, from the beginning, been based on research activities focussing on traffic psychology, traffic education, traffic engineering and the communicating of safety issues to the public by means of educational material and safety campaigns. From the start, managers and researchers at KfV regarded it as essential to seek international cooperation in research work and to acquire knowledge about other institutions' research results. Therefore, KfV has, for example, been an affilitate member of TRB (Transportation Research Board) since the early 1960s and has joined the ITRD (International Transport Research Documentation) of OECD (Organisation for Ecomomic Co-operation and Development) as soon as it came into existence.

For the first few years there was no organized library and documentation at the KfV. Each KfV institute and the individual researchers acquired national and international literature on their own. It very soon turned out that it was not helpful to have the literature scattered over the various institutes and researchers not knowing what literature was actually available inhouse, especially as KfV continuously grew into an institution with numerous organizational units and branches in each of the federal provinces of Austria. This situation initiated the establishing of a central library and documentation by the end of the 1960s
.
The present organizational structure of KfV is shown in this graph:

The number of staff in Vienna and in the eight branch offices in the federal provinces amounts to around 200 persons who are permanent staff and about 150 persons temporarily employed in the course of a year. In 1987, " The Austrian Institute for Home and Leisuretime Safety was founded as an affilitate of KfV to cover accident research and accident prevention in the spheres of home, leisuretime and sports.

In 2000, there was a major restructuring when the"Institute of Technical Safety," an institution for the prevention of fire, burglary and theft, was affilitated: a new association was founded by the name of "Kuratorium fuer Schutz und Sicherheit" with the organizational units KfV, The Austrian Institute for Home and Leisuretime Safety and the Institute for Technical Safety so that now all aspects of accident research and safety in any sphere of life are dealt with by one organization in Austria. These different fields of activities are also reflected in the holdings of the library.

2. Information resources, information services and information management

Information resources
Since its comparatively modest beginnings in the 1960s, the KfV Library and Documentation has developed into an internationally acknowledged source of transportation information. The holdings cover all fields of transport and traffic with Austrian and international literature from the 1950s onwards. Some 100 documents, however, date from between 1889 and 1950.

The emphasis in the collection of literature is laid on all aspects of traffic safety, especially focussing on traffic psychology, traffic engineering, traffic medicine, traffic education, driver training, driver improvement, vehicle safety, safety communication and road safety legislation. Apart from published literature, the holdings include a considerable amount of grey literature which is not at all available elsewhere. Also, there is a large stock of psychological and sociological literature and some 6,000 documents of the holdings relate to accident research in the spheres of home, leisuretime and sports.

The stock of literature is stored in a bibliographic database (DOKDAT) which presently references 80,000 documents. Annually, some 4,000 new documents are added.

KfV's literature collection is unique in Austria. For the greatest part the literature held at KfV is neither available at the Austrian National Library nor in any of the Austrian university libraries. As a consequence, KfV Library and Documentation is accessed by some 4,500 national and international users annually. About half of these users are external private or public users.

Information services
The library and documentation offers searches in its own database as well as in the ITRD database, document delivery services and extensive information services for external and internal users.

External users can access the KfV Library and Documentation very easily through the Internet. The address is: http://www.kfv.or.at/doku/ . The website provides information about the literature and information available at KfV, the information services, the database, KfV publications since 1959, periodicals held, the ITRD and links to all ITRD centres and the OECD. By clicking on the e-mail addresses given on this website any person of the permanent staff can immediately be contacted.

Information management
Information management is one of the most essential elements in the operation of the KfV Library and Documentation. The ambition is to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Thus, researchers at KfV in Vienna as well as in the branch offices in the federal provinces are continuously supplied with information about latest publications and new input to the documentation's database relating to their specific fields of work.

Additionally, the library and documentation publishes a quarterly bibliography which lists a selection of 500 publications that were acquired , abstracted and keyworded and stored in KfV's database DOKDAT within the preceeding three months. The contents of the bibliography are classified by 12 subject fields with 62 subfields and each bibliographic reference has an informative abstract. The bibliography is distributed to all KfV institutes and branch offices as well as to external subscribers.

To enable KfV staff in Vienna and in the branch offices to search the DOKDAT database on their own, a very user friendly intranet version of the database has been launched by the library and documentation in May 2001. Researchers at KfV now have the possibility to do searches right from their desks at any time they choose. The intranet database is updated monthly and the feedback to this new information facility is very positive.

3. Current information issues and likely future directions

In spring 2000, the KfV Library and Documentation has started with scanning its holdings of series. Presently, some 800,000 pages are already scanned and stored on CD ROMs. For the future, it is envisaged to enable internal users to have online access to full text articles by linking the bibliographic references in the database to the full text articles. This should be the first step towards a" digital library".

Another vision, probably for the far away future, is to move from information management to knowledge management. The most important pre-condition to realize this target will be to link all existing information resources at KfV, like the DOKDAT database, the research projects database, the database of press releases and press articles, and thus make them all jointly searchable in one run.