Your National Transportation Library—Transportation Tools, Tips, and Resources

RITA's National Transportation Library (NTL) is a digital library offering a variety of tools to help you find these and other transportation reports on a multitude of topics, whether they are publications of the U.S. DOT or housed in the digital libraries of state DOTs, various universities or library consortia, including the Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) Online.  So why not start out at the NTL home page at http://ntl.bts.gov/ and explore some of the possibilities? Below are just a few of the tools you can find at the NTL:

Custom Google Search Tools: This Google-powered search engine enables targeted searching of specific websites (e.g., all state DOT websites). Transportation librarians created the custom searches, which are all accessible through the NTL (http://ntl.bts.gov/faq/statedot.html).

The Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT) is an internationally used set of standard, or controlled, terms for transportation concepts, topics, methods which, in addition to keywords, are used to search and retrieve information. The TRT (available at http://ntlsearch.bts.gov/tris/trt.do) can also be used to organize websites and catalog data sets.

Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) Online, a subset of TRIS, is a specialized transportation database that contains over 535,000 citations and abstracts of technical reports, books, journal articles, and other transportation research with some links to full-text. TRIS includes international research and is available from online subscription services. TRIS Online, comprising most of TRIS and all U.S. research, is provided free online by the National Transportation Library and can be accessed at http://ntl.bts.gov/tris.

NTL's Integrated Search provides an in-tandem search of the NTL Digital Repository (full-text digital resources and digitized documents) and TRIS Online. The NTL Digital Repository includes statistical, technical, research, and policy documents provided by federal, state, local, tribal, and other government agencies and can be searched full text. The NTL Integrated Search can be found at http://ntlsearch.bts.gov.

Transportation Libraries Catalog (TLCat) is a combined library catalog for over 35 transportation libraries representing federal, state DOT, association, and university library collections throughout the country. With one search, users can locate resources locally and nationally. To borrow materials found in the catalog, contact your local library. TLCat is available free from the NTL at http://ntl.bts.gov/link.html.

Sources of Information in Transportation (SIT) is a collection of topical bibliographies, each divided into the following sections: basic references, statistical sources, standards, periodicals, conference proceedings, indexing/abstracting databases, dictionaries and glossaries, and electronic resources. Each bibliographic reference is annotated and contains links to additional information or the resource where appropriate. SIT is available at http://ntl.bts.gov/ref/biblio/index.html

TranStats is an online database for disseminating intermodal transportation data in a format suitable for analysis. The free public website at http://www.transtats.bts.gov allows users to search for transportation data sets, explore data, and download specific data from tables. It is most useful for Bureau of Transportation Statistics' data on airlines, border crossings, and ferries.

If, after you have completed your online search you cannot find exactly what you need or need further assistance finding information, please contact NTL's reference staff at Librarian@bts.gov for prompt service.