Transportation
Transportation Library
The Transportation Library supports the students and faculty of the Transportation Center. Containing more than 500,000 items, we are one of the largest transportation information centers in the world, encompassing information on all modes of transportation including pedestrian, bicycle, air, rail, highway, water, transit, and logistics.
Reference support is available by appointment Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Transportation Center
Northwestern University Transportation Center (NUTC) is a leading interdisciplinary education and research institution serving industry, government, and the public with substantive and enduring contributions to the movement of materials, people, energy, and information.
Environmental Impact Statement Collection
The Transportation Library holds one of the largest collections of environmental impact statements (EISs) in the nation. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 requires that federal agencies prepare detailed analyses of any of their actions that significantly affect the quality of the environment. Environmental impact statements (EISs) are the result of this requirement. EISs have been produced, since 1969, on virtually every type of activity, from oil and gas development to scientific research in Antarctica, and from protection of wildlife habitat to construction of light rail lines.
The library collection began as a 1992 donation of over 20,000 EIS titles from Northwestern faculty H. Paul Friesema, a leader in the environmental movement who was instrumental in developing the university’s program in Environmental Policy and Culture.
Since the initial donation, the library has continued to collect EISs and currently holds over 33,000 titles in print, microfilm, CD-ROM, and electronic formats. EIS titles from our collection digitized by Google are available in full text through HathiTrust and through the library’s discovery tool NUSearch.
Key Resources
The Transportation Library has one of the largest collections of Environmental Impact Statements in the nation, dating back to the onset of the environmental impact assessment program. Environmental Impact Statements are available to members of the Northwestern University community and to outside researchers, via Interlibrary Loan. Search our collections using the EIS tab in our catalog.
For more information on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), EIS filing guidance, and more, visit the Environmental Protection Agency's NEPA page.
A Citizen's Guide to the NEPA, published by the Council on Environmental Quality, provides a good overview of NEPA for individual citizens, private sector applicants, and other interested researchers.
- Environmental Impact Statements at Northwestern UniversitySearch for titles held by Northwestern University's Transportation Library.
- EIS Database - Environmental Protection AgencyRecords of all EISs received by the EPA since 1987, EPA comment letters on EISs since 2001, and electronic (PDF) versions of EISs received by EPA since October 2012.
- Full-text Environmental Impact StatementsOver 33K Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) reports digitized from our collection by Google, available in full text through the HathiTrust. Full text access is available to all single and multi-volume titles as well as to all parts. Please note that not all of our EIS titles were digitized by Google and that all hard copy titles are still available in the library and through interlibrary loan. It is also important to note that due to physical limitations in the scanning bed used by Google, they were unable to digitize oversized materials within the volumes such as maps, foldouts, etc.
- Environmental Protection AgencyFull-text EIS reports produced or contracted for the EPA (does not cover other agencies)
Resources for EISs
- Environmental Impact Statements at Northwestern UniversitySearch for titles held by Northwestern University's Transportation Library.
- HathiTrustOver 33,000 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) reports digitized from our collection by Google are available in full text through HathiTrust.
- Google BooksEISs from our collection digitized by Google can be accessed through Google Books.
Webinar - Environmental Impact Statements
- FDLP Webinar Recording
Public Services Librarian Rachel Cole covered Environmental Impact Statements for the Federal Depository Library Program's webinar series. Learn more about EIS history, contents, and uses here.
Our Collections
What we do collect: Environmental Impact Statements (EISs), dating to the beginning of the NEPA program, including Draft and Final versions. While we do have one of the nation's largest collections, we do not own every EIS.
We do not collect Categorical Exclusions (CEs), Environmental Impact Assessments (EAs), and Environmental Impact Reports (produced by states).