National Rural Transit Assistance Program (National RTAP) has had a library since it began in 1987. What makes us unique is that we publish many of our own resources (including hard copy books and discs), which our team (including myself) writes, edits, and oversees subject matter expert (SME) input. We have a physical and electronic collection. When COVID-19 is no longer a concern, we look forward to welcoming back visitors to our library. Our web portal, Resource Share, contains over 700 of our resources plus selected full-text resources from our partners, on many topics in rural and tribal bus transit. We offer training modules, technical briefs, webinars, eLearning, and much more. Our staff consists of myself and a wonderful resource center assistant, who can ship any of our free print resources to rural and tribal transit agencies.
Cara Marcus - Resource Center Manager of National RTAP
Since rural transit is a specialized field, I always tap my own library database first. Then onto NTL Rosa-P, and the TRB TRID Library, the Rural Road Safety Library, U.S. Dot’s ITS DataHub, BTS Research Hub, and the databases available through the Massachusetts Library System to member libraries. I also maintain a Find Anything Toolkit, which has a list of alternative search engines for when you need to search the web.
I’ve developed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portal with our IS department, which lets me quickly find previous searches I’ve completed on the same or similar topics so I don’t have to “reinvent the wheel.” While the library intakes reference questions through chat, email, web-form, and phone calls, I always feel an old-fashioned reference interview is the best way to find out what the patron needs. I like to include brief abstracts or excerpts from sources that pinpoint the topic – for example, if someone is looking for approaches to fund specialized transportation, I would send them a list of state management plans, research synopses, etc., with synthesized abstracts about the best practices from each resource. I also include a link to a customer satisfaction survey when I complete a literature search. There are questions about which resource was the most helpful and least helpful, which helps me plan for future literature searches with the most relevant results to my user groups. 
In addition to NTKN, I am a member of Special Libraries Association (SLA), TRB Committee on Information and Knowledge Management, Massachusetts Library System, and Massachusetts Health Information Library Network. While National RTAP is not a professional organization per se, we provide training and technical assistance to rural and tribal transit agencies and State RTAP programs throughout the U.S. and its territories, are governed by an expert review board of State DOT and transit agency leaders, and are one of five of Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) Technical Assistance Centers, so I am regularly interfacing with transit thought-leaders and disseminating their recommendations.
Time management (I recently gave a webinar on the topic) in conjunction with the ability to take large amounts of information and synthesize it into easy-to-understand summaries (even for topics I have never heard of before). Give me a 200 page document and I’ll hand back a 1-5 page summary in plain-language within a few days.
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