Resource of the Week: U.S. Department of Transportation Library
Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
We're pleased to take a look at an excellent federal library site this week. Although some of its services are restricted to members of its parent agency, there's plenty of content here to share with everyone.
Libraries--Federal Government
Source: U.S. Department of Transportation U.S. Department of Transportation Library
"The DOT Library is one of the largest transportation libraries in the United States. The library holds more than 200,000 titles, including over 1000 periodical titles. The library collects materials related to all areas of transportation, both in print and electronic formats. The technical collection is the primary source for materials concerning general transportation, surface, and water transportation. Special topics include: bridges, driver studies, engineering (emphasis on civil), highways and highway safety, history of transportation, land utilization, marine engineering, mass transit, merchant marine, navigation (except air), oceanography, pipelines, railroads, ships and shipbuilding, statistics, traffic engineering, traffic surveys and forecasts, urban transportation, and waterways."
Wow. Prowl around here and you'll find many interesting items. There's the OPAC, of course, which contains more than 80,000 bibliographic records. Do a simple keyword search; browse by title, author, publisher or other categories; or use the power search function, which provides Boolean options via dropdown menus.
We find the Online Digital Special Collections particularly intriguing. Here you can access a variety of historical materials, including Civil Aeronautic Manuals, Historic Railroad Investigation Reports, Historical Aircraft Accident Reports, historic and superseded regulations of various types and more.
A number of annotated bibliographies -- on statistics, special topics in transportation, and aviation safety and security -- are available here. There's also a large selection of vetted Web resources, including links to search engines, ready reference materials, newspapers and journals, full-text documents online, and transportation resources, associations and libraries. And there is a page of links to DOT law libraries.
Finally, take a quick look at the DOT Historian's home page. Here's where you'll find the department history, biographical sketches of the secretaries of transportation, chronologies, and a bibliography.
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