School of Philosophy and Bioethics

1. The School

The Faculty of Arts is one of the largest in the university, in terms of student numbers, and was one of the foundation faculties of Monash University. It offers courses on the Berwick, Caulfield, Clayton and Gippsland campuses in Australia and at the Monash Malaysia and South Africa campuses. The faculty has an enrolment of over 8,031 students, of whom nearly 1300 are postgraduate. There are 333 academic staff in the faculty. Most honours courses and graduate courses are offered on the Clayton campus.

Within the faculty there are eight academic schools, most have several departments. The schools are as follows: School of English, Communications and Performance Studies; School of Geography and Environmental Science; School of Historical studies; School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences; School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics; School of Music-Conservatorium; School of Philosophy and Bioethics; and the School of Political and Social Inquiry.

Some schools incorporate interdisciplinary centres as follows: Centre for Archaeology and Ancient History, Australian Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, National Centre for Australian Studies, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Centre for European Studies, Centre for Human Bioethics, Centre for Japanese Language Education, Language and Learning, Research Centre for New Media in Language Learning, Centre for Population and Urban Research, Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, and Centre for Research on Work and Society in the Global Era.

The School of Philosophy and Bioethics (www.arts.monash.edu.au/philosophy-bioethics/) consists of two departments – the Department of Philosophy (www.arts.monash.edu.au/phil/) and the Centre for Human Bioethics (www.arts.monash.edu.au/bioethics/). The School has a student load of 278 EFTSU, of which approximately 53 are postgraduate. There are 20 teaching staff in the school.

Department of Philosophy : A major, honours and postgraduate studies are available on the Clayton campus, with more limited offerings on the Caulfield and Gippsland campuses. The department's research strengths lie in the area of analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, but it is also strong in recent European thought, feminism and the history of ideas.

Centre for Human Bioethics : The Centre offers PhD and masters by research degrees. It also offers masters by coursework and post-graduate diplomas. Research strengths include ethical issues in patient care, especially involving autonomy and confidentiality; the ethics of clinical trials; ethical problems of resources allocation; medical end-of-life decisions; new reproductive technologies; nursing ethics; surrogacy; disability and discrimination; the new genetics and ethics; moral psychology and moral development; and professional ethics and moral psychology of professional roles. The Centre is also strong in ethical theory, especially virtue ethics and consequentialism, the relevance of emotions to ethics, partiality and impartiality in ethics, and feminist ethics.

2. General policy statement

The Collection Development Policy covers printed books and journals, electronic resources, multimedia and any other formats acquired for the Library's collection.

The Policy is regularly monitored to ensure that the selection and acquisition of new resources supports the teaching and research needs of the faculties and their departments. While every effort is made to meet known information needs some gaps in the collection may develop which need attention, and suggestions to address them are welcome. This may be done through liaison with library staff or, for individual titles, using the recommendation form at lib.monash.edu.au/forms/acquisition-request.doc

To ensure that the library provides collection materials to support new courses and subjects, completion of a Library Impact Statement lib.monash.edu.au/forms/impact.doc is required. When establishing new research directions staff are encouraged to liaise with the library about the provision of supporting information resources.

All titles listed as prescribed or recommended reading for teaching subjects are acquired as high priority and in multiple copies depending on student enrolment numbers. This is particularly necessary for undergraduate students, who need access to adequate resources on their home campus. Electronic versions of these texts are also provided where possible, so that access is more readily available regardless of location and number of copies held. The inter-campus loan and photocopy services for undergraduates further support the needs of those students.

However, the library cannot acquire every item that could conceivably be needed by Monash staff or students. The reciprocal borrowing scheme enables Monash library users to borrow from other university libraries. Post-graduates and staff may also use the document delivery service to obtain books and articles from other libraries in Australia and overseas.

3. The Library's collection

a. Location

Material purchased for the School of Philosophy and Bioethics is predominantly located in the Matheson Library on the Clayton campus. Audiovisual material is kept in the Music and Multimedia Library. Some material on Philosophy is purchased for the Caulfield and Gippsland campus libraries.

Significant amounts of material on bioethics are also purchased by departments of the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Medicine, and these are located in the Hargrave-Andrew Library on the Clayton campus. The Law Library holds significant material relating to ethics and bioethics. Material on professional ethics is also acquired for the departments of the Faculty of Business and Economics.

Philosophy of science materials are acquired by departments of the Faculty of Science and these are held predominantly in the Hargrave-Andrew Library, with a smaller collection on the Gippsland campus.

b. Language

Material is acquired for the School of Philosophy and Bioethics mainly in the English language, but some foreign language material is purchased, mainly in French and German.

c. Classification used

The Library's collections relevant to the School of Philosophy and Bioethics are classified using the Dewey Decimal Classification.

d. Formats.

No format is excluded, although in practice the majority of the collection is monographs or serials, both print and electronic.

e. Size of the collection.

Number of print serial titles received : approx. 190

The ten-volume Routledge encyclopedia of Philosophy is available in print and CD-ROM formats at the Matheson Library as well as being available to all staff and students via the Internet.

The Matheson and Hargrave-Andrew libraries have significant holdings of important print indexes such as ISIS: Cumulative Bibliography: a Bibliography of the History of Science, The International Philosophical Bibliography, Abstracts in Anthropology and Bibliography of Bioethics.

f. Significant electronic resources

The Library is purchasing increased numbers of resources in electronic format, including networked or internet databases, fulltext resources including suites of electronic journals, and CD-ROM databases that are only accessible within a particular Branch library. As a result, an increasing proportion of the budget for library material for the Faculty of Arts is spent on these resources.

These include Indexing and abstracting services :

• Humanities Abstracts
• MLA
• PAIS
• Sociofile
• APAIS
• ERIC
• Philosophers Index and
• Medline

Fulltext databases / electronic journal suites :

• Expanded Academic ASAP (over 1,500 titles, of which approximately 520 are in fulltext)
• Project MUSE (over 200 journals)
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• LegalTrac (approximately 1,950 journals of which 222 are in fulltext) and
• Elibrary (online reference library).

Subject gateways : the Library's subject pages for Philosophy (www.lib.monash.edu.au/subjects/philosophy/) and Bioethics  (www.lib.monash.edu.au/subjects/bioethics/), Bioethicsline (www.georgetown.edu/research/nrcbl/), The WWW Virtual Library Philosophy (www.bris.ac.uk/philosophy/)

Approximately 24% of the library materials budget for the Faculty of Arts is spent on serials, and 14% on electronic resources.

g. Coverage of the collection

The library resources acquired for the School cover in general those areas of the Dewey Decimal Classification relating to philosophy and ethics the 100s, Ethics in 200s, 300s when related to sociological topics, and 660 for biotechnology.

The main areas of collecting for Philosophy are detailed below

There is a large collection of material on a wide range of philosophical areas of study and philosophers, including foreign language books and journals. The collection supports both undergraduate teaching and independent research at the postgraduate level. There are significant collections in analytic philosophy, ethics, feminist theory, history of ideas, philosophy of language, philosophy of science and other areas of study.

The collection to support teaching in Philosophy on the Caulfield campus is estimated at 2,367 volumes.

The main areas of collecting for Human Bioethics are detailed below

Monash University Library has very strong holdings in Medical Ethics which may be available in either Matheson or Hargrave- Andrew Libraries. The Matheson library is building up a stronger collection in Professional ethics, particularly in Business, Law and Medicine. It will be less actively adding to its existing strong collection of animal rights material

4. Other significant Monash collections or resources

Philosophy

Microform collection : The Wittgenstein papers (21 reels)

Amendment history

December 2000

First issued

June 2006

Updated

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