Inventories of NTKN Cooperative Digitization projects.
NTKN seeks to promote a cooperative-digitization effort among all TKN libraries and member organizations. The primary task is to determine how much of the entirety of transportation literature has been digitized, how it is stored and preserved, and how access is gained. Seeing as how much of the core literature in transportation research has been funded, created, and published by the US DOT, the natural place to begin this work is with deaccessioned materials from the USDOT Library, now owned by NTL. Working through this body of material to determine how much has been digitized and currently resides in ROSA-P and how much of it has yet to be digitized will go a long way to reducing the burden of libraries that are considering digitizing portions of their collection that are composed of US DOT materials. Once we have a handle on US DOT literature, we can begin to develop an inventory of digitized materials published by state DOTs and then expand from there. Just knowing what has been digitized and making thos materials’ metadata, if not the files themselves, available through ROSA-P will be a major accomplishment and a boon for transportation research. It could potentially save agencies who are considering digitizing their materials thousands of dollars to discover that a cooperative-digitization effort has already revealed existing digital copies. Once the discovery and cataloging (metadata capture) work has been accomplished, we can turn our efforts to discovering resources for digitization print materials that have yet to be digitized.