The Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library and Archive is one of the most comprehensive transit operator-owned library resources in the United States. As the only multimodal transportation library in Southern California, we serve employees, the public, governments and research institutions.
Our origins date back to the days of the Los Angeles Railway in 1890, but we were reintroduced to the public by the Southern California Rapid Transit District in 1971. The Metro Library began with a collection of materials owned by Planning Department staff of our predecessor agency, the former SCRTD. In 1978 a professional Librarian was hired to develop the specialized transportation collection, archive historically significant items, and provide reference services to employees and the public.
The Library was renamed "The Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library" by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board of Directors in October, 2001. Our name commemorates the distinguished 13-year career that built our transportation library into one of the nation's finest. We are recognized for providing the research, resources, history, and archives that give context to transportation issues and history in Los Angeles and Southern California, as well as leadership within the transportation research community.
We maintain strong ties with the UC Berkeley Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library, the CalTrans Library, and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Library, along with similar institutions throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia for mutual support and research needs.
We partner with a number of local, national, and international entities in cooperative ventures and information sharing. We also work with the National Transportation Library and the Transportation Research Board to improve the availability of transportation-related information needed by federal, state and local decision-makers. We provide timely access to information supporting transportation policy, research, operations, and technology transfer.
The library is a member of OCLC, the largest international library services network and research organization, dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information, reducing information costs, and assisting in the location, acquisition, cataloging, lending, and preservation of library materials.
Library staff have MLIS degrees and are members of several professional organizations, including the Special Library Association’s Transportation Division and the Transportation Research Board’s Information Services and Library and Information Science in Transportation committees.
In addition to the Library and Archive, we maintain many web-hosted sites providing publicly-accessible resources which offer opportunities for our fans, friends, and subscribers to communicate with us and interact with our collections.
Our Transportation Headlines blog has kept readers and subscribers abreast of aggregated news content since 2006, while our Twitter feed makes timely announcements of notable Library and transportation-related events.
Our Facebook and MySpace profiles, as well as our Second Life presence, provide critical exposure to our social networking communities.
We have deployed several resource-sharing sites as well. Our Flickr photostream contains thousands of unique historic images organized into collections and photosets to assist you with comprehensive research, searching by keyword tags or with a map depicting where photographs were taken.
Our YouTube channel brings together not only our own historic (and often humorous) video collection, but content provided by others to present a comprehensive look at Los Angeles transit and transportation via the moving image.
Our document collection on Scribd provides easy access to many of our most heavily-requested publications and other resources.
We also support Google Custom Search Engines for meta-search across all major transit agencies and transit-related organization websites for fares, routes, data, reports, research, press releases, budgets, policies, programs, and other transit industry information.
