Improving access to transportation documents: the roles of repositories, thesauri, metadata and automated keyword generation

Web access has transformed the way in which information can be discovered and accessed, but the questions of quality and reliability remain. This paper explores the interactions between repositories, document and data, discovery and accessibility from the point of view of researchers themselves, based on a researcher built repository framework and the practical solutions to metadata entry, access and the key area for metadata generation and input. Most of the current literature focuses on a library science approaches and communities, and the present paper comes to a more convergent view -but from the stance of transportation researchers. More effort is needed to ensure that the full benefits of these new resources are secured by greater equality and collaboration in interworking between library and transportation research practitioners. The positive initial results from automated keyword generation by using multiple transport thesauri within full text repositories now offers a real opportunity to improve these thesauri in a realistic interactive team environment- and in a reasonable time. Better transport analysis and modeling methodology keyword metadata could substantially improve document discovery in this area.