The Harmer E. Davis Library

What’s Old? What’s New?

In recent months, librarians at Harmer E. Davis Library have been asked to find the following:

• an article with a subtitle that contained the words “the tolled, the tolled-off and the un-told”;
• notes from a lecture by traffic flow theorist Gordon Newell;
• papers by traffic researcher Bruce Greenshields from the 1950s through the early 1970s on traffic statistics;
  
• studies on the benefits of adding passing lanes on rural, two-lane roads;
  
• information on alternative fuel and rolling stock for use in a high-altitude ski resort;
  
• studies on trip generation at amusement parks.

Such requests are typical. These came from a diverse group of former students now working in the transportation field as faculty or private consultants, a visiting scholar from the German Aerospace Center, an analyst from the Calaveras County Department of Public Works, and an Assistant Airport Manager at Mammoth Yosemite Airport.

In each case, the librarians responded with electronic and/or print materials. In rare cases when they cannot fill a request, they suggest other resources. And although the library, more commonly referred to as the ITS Transportation Library, is located on the fourth floor of McLaughlin Hall, it serves not only UC Berkeley students, faculty and researchers, but also students and faculty at sister ITS campuses at Davis, Irvine and Los Angeles.

“This is the Institute’s official library. It is here for all the units,”
explains library Director Rita Evans. “We are their library,
too, even though we’re housed here.”

It also assists former students, companies that are corporate affiliates, and employees of public agencies. In fact, it has been integral to the Institute’s success since the beginning.

First Things First

When Harmer Davis established the Institute of Transportation Studies in 1948, the first employee he hired was Beverly Hickok, who was charged with creating the first academic library devoted to transportation in the nation. With a budget of $10,000 she bought what she could, and asked public agencies, government offices, and anyone else she thought might have relevant materials, books, or reports to send her copies.

Over the next half century, the library grew to become the largest transportation library west of the Mississippi, and today it is second in size only to Northwestern University’s Transportation Library. From Hickok’s early acquisitions, the library’s collection has expanded to include more than 300,000 volumes, including 150,000 technical reports, and hundreds of scholarly journals, trade magazines, and other serial publications.

“Our collection is multimodal,” explains Evans. “It includes highway and traffic engineering, public transportation, aviation, railroads, and maritime, and it is interdisciplinary. We cover transportation engineering and policy, finance and planning.”

Over the years, the library has provided an invaluable resource for students, faculty, and researchers, both within the Institute and throughout the University of California.

Yanfeng Ouyang, who earned his PhD in transportation engineering at UC Berkeley and is now an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found the library and its staff to be a tremendous benefit when he was a graduate student.

“Often I would just email the staff and they would gather together the information I needed and have it ready for me to pick up,” he recalled.
As a faculty member at University of Illinois, he still finds the library helpful for resources available nowhere else, as well as to keep on top of current thinking in transportation.

“Berkeley has the best transportation education system in the country, so last June I was out there for a conference and I spent time in the library looking through recent dissertations—just to catch up on what’s happening.”

Kamala Parks, who received her Joint Master’s in transportation engineering and planning in 2005 and now works as an associate transportation planner and engineer for a consulting firm, continues to use the library for information not available online or something rare. “Not only are the people fabulous, but they help me refine the search.” Most recently she was searching for studies on trip generation at amusement parks. “Rita (Evans) found one about Disneyland and another about a park in Florida. I used it extensively,” she added.

It also provides reference services and publications to public agency employees in cooperation with the Institute's Technology Transfer Program.

Vickie Smith-Becker, an analyst at the Calaveras County Department of Public Works, recently requested information on the benefits of adding passing lanes on rural, two-lane roads in order to prepare a grant application. “I emailed a request and the librarian not only sent me some electronic files on the subject, but copied print resources that weren’t available online and mailed them to me.”

A New Website and Continuing Outreach

The staff of seven full-time employees includes three librarians who handle cataloging, reference, instruction and management, and four support staff who handle administration, circulation, and interlibrary loans. The librarians are active in Transportation Research Board committee work and the Transportation Division of the Special Libraries Association.

In order to help students and faculty find their way around the world of transportation information within the library and on the Web, the staff will roll out a new website later this year aimed at helping users locate electronic materials more easily and quickly online. “We want to focus on people finding things, as opposed to searching for things,” explained Evans

As part of that effort, outreach librarian John Gallwey regularly visits the other ITS campuses at UC Davis, Irvine and UCLA to familiarize transportation students and faculty with the library’s resources and how to access them.

“John has been so generous with his time, coming to our fall student orientations every year to spread the word about the resources that the library provides to all UC campuses, responding promptly and cheerfully to my numerous requests for articles and other documents, and generally just going above and beyond the call of duty,” recalled UC Davis Professor Patricia Mokhtarian.  “I, personally, and the UC Davis transportation community collectively, are very grateful for the excellent service offered by the library over the years.”

This fall, Gallwey will travel to UC Davis, and circulation manager Kendra Levine will meet with transportation students and faculty at UCLA and Irvine.

The Money Crunch

As with most libraries these days, however, there is never enough money to keep up with rising costs. Evans pointed out that between 1986 and 2006 the Consumer Price Index rose 78 percent. By comparison, the average cost of an annual subscription to an academic journal rose a whopping 167 percent. And because the the transportation library is a specialty library—one of 11 on the Berkeley campus—it cooperates with, but is not funded by, the main campus library system. Instead, its budget depends on funds received from the Institute.

To stretch those limited funds further, the library is joining with Northwestern’s Transportation Library to identify, catalog, and digitally archive the hundreds of technical reports issued monthly by the National Technical Information Service. By sharing the tasks as well as the costs, the information contained in those reports will also be available to researchers more quickly, and there will be little duplication of money or time.

“We also will collaborate with Northwestern on the purchase of dissertations with the aim of less overlap on what we each purchase. This way we leverage the amount of money we have for purchases and make them available more quickly to the entire transportation community,” Evans explained.

These three stacks EACH represent a cost of $1,000
that the library must pay in order to have them available to library patrons

The Wish List

But collaboration cannot provide other acquisitions or improvements.

As an example, she points to a complete run, beginning in 1921, of the Highway Research Record, predecessor to the Transportation Research Record. The first 40 years of these old volumes, from 1921 to 1961, would be excellent candidates for digital scanning and preservation, said Evans. “It would greatly improve access,” she added. “In early September, we had a request and scanned an article from a 1935 HRR. In fact, the HRRs are used so often that we can’t put them in storage.” Instead they sit on a shelf in her office.

“Everyone thinks everything is available now on the Web,” she adds. “It’s not. I took a call the other day from somebody looking for a copy of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978,” explained Evans. “That’s another one of those things that’s just not accessible digitally.” Much of Bay Area transportation history related to the Key System or BART is not available online as it should be.

Evans has a number of other projects she is eager to move forward on, but funding is key. For that reason, she and her team have drawn up a wish list with the hope that over time grateful users will donate what they can to help the library make even more information available.

She would like to make electronic journals more easily available by enhancing the Transportation Information Research Service (TRIS) database with UC-elinks so students and others would have direct access to licensed resources, such as articles from Transportation Science, when searching the database.

She hopes to purchase equipment that allows a user to scan one of the 150,000 technical reports (or a dissertation) on microfiche, produce a pdf, and download it to a flash drive.

She would like to partner with others on campus to prepare an exhibit, website, and publication on transportation in China, where UC researchers are helping engineers and planners provide 21st century transportation options to help preserve the environment.

(see sidebar for wish list)

Home Away from Home

While the library’s holdings are huge, the library itself doesn’t seem so to those who use it.

As Betty Deakin, Director of the University of California Transportation Center, put it: “It is the only library I have ever worked in where, when I walk in, I am greeted by name and asked what I am working on, and then given several relevant publications that the librarians have seen—located by just walking to the right place on the shelves and pulling out the volumes. It would be one thing if it were a tiny little collection, but it is huge!”

Former students remember it as a home away from home. Robert Bertini, now an associate professor at Portland State University, recalls the library as a place where “personal touches like the newspaper on the bookshelf by the window made a real difference.” As a student in room 416F, he adds, “We had no heat, window or ventilation, so I remember using the library as a refuge on hot and cold days—those old radiators can really pump out the heat!”

At this year’s orientation for incoming transportation students, library director Rita Evans encouraged students, as she does every year, to think of the library as their home. “Unlike most libraries, we don't care if you talk here. We want our students to feel comfortable in the library—eating and talking is fine. But the bottom line is delivering the information. If you're having trouble finding something, ask us.That’s what we’re here for."