Library Policies

Mission
To provide CDOT staff, consultants, local government, and Colorado residents timely access to materials related to planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating transportation facilities.

Reference and Research
The CDOT Library is open Monday through Friday from 8:00 to 4:30.  Requests for information are normally handled within 24 hours of receipt. Since there is only one Librarian on the staff, customers should call before visiting the Library to ensure reference services will be available.

There is a photocopy machine down the hall from the Library. Customers should limit the number of copies to 20 pages and are expected to comply with the requirements of national copyright laws.

Materials for Loan
Colorado residents and CDOT employees may borrow CD-ROMs, DVDs, magazines, and books for two weeks, with some exceptions. AASHTO publications are limited to overnight loan, due to their importance as reference materials. A core collection of reference materials is for library use only. The career development and computer resource collections are reserved for CDOT employees.

The Staff Librarian will mail materials to CDOT employees via interoffice mail. Materials will be mailed to Colorado residents who can't visit the Library in person, provided the shipping costs are under $10.00, and they agree to pay for the return shipping.

There are no fines for overdue materials. Customers who damage or lose materials are expected to make arrangements to replace them. Customers who keep materials for over three months without prior permission will have their borrowing privileges suspended until the materials have been returned or replaced. The Staff Librarian has the discretion to permanently revoke the borrowing privileges of negligent customers.

Interlibrary Loan
The CDOT Library has an interlibrary loan account with the Denver Public Library. CDOT employees have the option of requesting interlibrary loan services for transportation-related publications that are not in the CDOT Library. If the material is available from a library in the Prospector system, it will take several days to arrive. (Prospector is a unified catalog of academic, public and special libraries in Colorado and Wyoming with access to over 13 million books, journals, sound recordings, films, videotapes and other materials held in these libraries.) If the material is not available from a Prospector library, the loan process could take up to three weeks. Interlibrary loan requests will not be processed for materials that cost less than $25.00, with the exception of journal articles.

The CDOT Library does not provide interlibrary loan services to other libraries or non-CDOT employees.

Acquisitions
Ongoing enhancement of the Library collection is an essential aspect of providing professional information services. The Staff Librarian uses paper and online catalogs, book reviews, newsletters, acquisition lists from other transportation libraries, journal articles, and literature searches to seek out and review potential new acquisitions.

CDOT employees may recommend the purchase of specific publications or publication categories. Recommendations should be made directly to the Librarian, who will base purchases on cost and relevance to the collection.

Materials Retention
In the interest of keeping Library holdings relevant and up-to-date, the Staff Librarian routinely weeds outdated and obsolete materials from the collection. The decision to retain or discard materials depends on a number of factors including knowledge of the collection; familiarity with the field of transportation publications; nature of the technology; age, subject, publisher, and price of the material; availability and price of replacements; usage; and space limitations. The advice of subject experts at CDOT is also an important consideration. Most AASHTO and Transportation Research Board publications are retained on a permanent basis.

Publication Orders
The Staff Librarian is not able to order publications for other units at CDOT. If a CDOT employee wants to order a publication for use in another unit, the Librarian will make every effort to obtain ordering information.

Donations
Donations of materials to the CDOT Library are accepted with the provision that the Librarian has the discretion of discarding them if they do not benefit the collection.

CDOT Research Reports
Recent CDOT Research reports are available in electronic format on the web:
http://www.coloradodot.info/programs/research/pdfs

Single paper copies of older reports that are in stock are available free of charge upon request. Most older reports can be borrowed from the Library.

Electronic Resources
The Staff Librarian will provide Internet searches and support to all CDOT Library customers, including customized searches of the Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) and Research-in-Progress databases.

The Library does not supply terminals for customers to use to access the Internet themselves.