The library is located on the fourth floor of McLaughlin Hall, the original UC Berkeley Engineering Building, where it serves the faculty, students, researchers and staff of the multi-campus Institute of Transportation Studies.
The library collection, begun by librarian Bev Hickok in 1948,[2] covers all aspects of civil transportation, containing over 183,000 monographs (books, technical reports, conferences, etc.
Much foreign material also comes in, primarily from Canada (including French language publications from Quebec), Australia, and several western European countries (mainly the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland).
It was officially renamed in 1998 in honor of the Institute of Transportation Studies’ founder, Harmer E. Davis, who died that year.
It is the venue for the Institute's weekly social gathering of students and faculty each Friday afternoon during semester, and the monthly Traffic Safety Center seminar series.
Recent meetings in ITSL included the Women In Transportation's annual Fall seminar; an Institute of Transportation Engineers presentation to Institute students; a lunch-meeting between ITS faculty and Association of America Railroads personnel; and a reception for a delegation from the US DOT's Research and Special Programs Administration.
Students and faculty at these campuses are encouraged to regard the Library as their own and they are supplied directly with free loans or photocopies from its collections.
In addition to creating bibliographic records for monographs we produce a large number of analytics (journal and magazine articles, individual conference papers for which we have provided full cataloging).