The Center for Transportation Research is a special library in Austin which is sponsored both by the Texas Department of Transportation and the University of Texas. They partner primarily with TxDOT and the Cockrell School of Engineering. CTR publishes reports sponsored by both institutions and these materials make up a large portion of their collection. Though CTR is part of UT, their collection is not searchable through the UT OPAC.

CTR has only one search screen (rather than simple and advanced search screens) with multiple categories. However, the search function is not very flexible. If a user searches using a misspelled work, they will not get any entries unless the word happens to be misspelled in the same way in the catalog. Additionally, the order of names in the “author” field has to match the catalog’s entry. Searching for author “Won, Moon” yields 18 results while searching for “Moon Won” finds only one match. In this latter case, the catalog entry lists the author as “Moon Won” rather than listing his last name first. Searching by keyword allows for more flexibility because it does not search by exact phrase unless quotation marks are used.

There are some nice things about the OPAC. Conveniently, some search tips are included at the bottom of the page which help users understand some of the short cuts and tricks of this particular OPAC. Users also have the ability to search more than one field at a time and to indicate “and,” “or,” or “not.” If I wanted reports related to the city of Portland and not about Portland Cement Concrete Pavements, I could type Portland in the title and search “NOT” “cement” in the keyword field. Sadly, I could not put both words in as keywords if I wanted to exclude one. More unfortunately, when I followed the ‘help’ link the page could not be found.

The results page offers more challenges to users. All of the results are listed on one page which some users may prefer to 10 results per page. The number of results is listed at the very top of the page in the blue bar rather than closer to the results themselves. Furthermore, I am not sure how the results are ordered on the page and there’s no indication they’re listed by relevance or date. On the bright side, the page allows the information to be viewed in several different formats but several of them were designed specifically for staff use. By clikcing n the title of a report, the full record will be displayed. Sometimes the full display differs from the brief record only by adding a bar code number but many of the reports have abstracts as well.

Certainly CTR’s OPAC leaves something to be desired. The searches lack precision and give results in no particular order. The help feature leads nowhere and reports often have little information attached. But CTR seems to have recognized some of the weakness by adding instructions ot the bottom of the search page and by adding the number of records listed at the top of the page. These changes help even though they are sometimes difficult to spot. The advantage for CTR is that they are one of the few transportation libraries with an OPAC so even if it doesn’t work well, people have to continue using it. Such is the world of supply and demand.