BRIDGE MAINTENANCE

With today’s search tools, looking for information about bridge maintenance often yields enormous numbers of results. The following table shows the number of results obtained when using several online search tools that are commonly used by transportation professionals.

ONLINE RESOURCE / KEYWORD SEARCH RESULTS / PHRASE (QUOTES) RESULTS
Google / 6,130,000 / 5,670,000
Google Scholar / 860,000 / 3,830
TLCat / 2,289 / 1,954 (LC Subject Heading)
NTL Integrated Search (TRIS + NTL Digital Repository) / 7,384 / 1,267
TRB Research in Progress / 192 / 47
TRB Publications Index / 1,080 / 296
iCivilEngineer.com / 294,000 / 44,600
FHWA websites / 13,700 / 627
Scirus / 687,566 / 12,799

The numbers for transportation-specific sites are less overwhelming, so that even a more general keyword search could result in some useful documents. But the mainstream and multi-disciplinary search tools – the exclusive search tools of half of all those in fields of science, according to a 2004 Elsevier survey* - provide many more results, and finding accurate and relevant information in the deluge is nearly impossible.

Librarians and information professionals are trained to search for, access, evaluate, and organize information resources.They are able to help a customer narrow and define their specific interests, making it easier to find more relevant materials.They understand how to structure a search, to find resources that are both pertinent to the topic and from reliable sources. If the needed reports aren’t available online or in-house, they can be borrowed from another library – often from TKN partners, who have developed collaborative relationships within their associations.

But TKNs have the potential for doing far more than this. A National Transportation Knowledge Network (NTKN), composed of the regional TKNs coordinated by a well-funded National Transportation Library (NTL), could offer the transportation professional seeking information about bridge maintenance many options. He could contact his agency’s library, whose staff would be able to supply him with information quickly and thoroughly, with expanded resources developed and maintained by the TKNs.Information portals, offering a café of choices, could help them drill down to the specific topic needed, without the frustrating and time-consuming searching that even sophisticated searchers face today. Or, the customer could be self-sufficient, accessing the portals through a link on his library’s homepage, and taking a few minutes to go through a short tutorial showing him how to use the portals. In either case, the transportation professional would come away with the needed information in a manner greatly enhanced by the efforts of the TKNs.

*June, 2004 LibraryConnect newsletter