About Us

Metro’s Transportation Research Library & Archive is one of the most comprehensive transit operator-owned library resources in the United States. As the only multi-modal transportation library in Southern California, we serve employees, the public, governments, and research institutions.

Our origins date back to the days of our public transportation predecessors, the Los Angeles Consolidated Electric Railway (1895) and Pacific Electric Railway (1899). Our interactive “family tree” of direct predecessor agencies and interactive Los Angeles transportation history timeline illustrate the complex history of L.A.’s transit and transportation history from the 1870s to the present.

HISTORY

The Library was renamed The Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library and Archive 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 collecting, preserving, and providing access to research, resources, and historical assets that provide context for transportation issues in Los Angeles and Southern California.

We are highly regarded as leaders within the transportation research community. Our staff is active in many local, state, and national library and archives membership organizations and have received several awards for our innovative work.

Our collection is comprised of books, technical studies, environmental impact reports, maps, historic images, film and other media formats, including digital documents. Our catalog, along with links to hundreds of full-text digital documents, is accessible 24/7 at: http://librarycat.metro.net

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 for federal, state and local decision-makers.

We provide timely access to information supporting transportation policy, research, operations, and technology transfer. You can find much more of our curated information online via our our Los Angeles-focused Transportation Headlines daily digital newspaper.

Our Flickr photostream contains over 11,000 unique contemporary and historical images organized into collections and photo-sets 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 historical (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.

We utilize Google Custom Search Engines for various special collections of websites and digitized material:

You can also find/follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, HistoryPin, Twitter and the Online Archive of California.

For reference questions, please email us at library@metro.net

MISSION

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VISION

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