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Department of economics1. The departmentFollowing the merger of Monash University, Chisholm Institute and the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education, a new Faculty of Business and Economics was formed in 1993. The faculty now offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses on five campuses in Victoria - Caulfield, Clayton, Gippsland, Peninsula and Berwick -- as well as overseas. The Faculty of Business and Economics operates as six departments: Accounting and Finance; Business Law and Taxation; Econometrics and Business Statistics; Economics; Management; Marketing. The faculty has over 12,200 students, including approximately 1,800 postgraduates. There are 376 academic staff in the faculty. The Department of Economics offers and conducts a wide range of subjects as part of undergraduate and postgraduate course programs. The department teaches undergraduate units to third level on the Berwick and Peninsula campuses, with both undergraduate and postgraduate courses available on the Clayton, Gippsland and Caulfield campuses. The department has a teaching load of 960 undergraduate and 47 postgraduate student EFTSU, and 45 teaching staff. The principal areas of research of the department include computable general equilibrium modelling, development economics, economic modelling and forecasting, economic history (including Australian and Asian), economics of education and training, environmental economics, foreign direct investment, health economics and health program evaluation, international trade and capital movements, labour economics, macroeconomic theory and application, mesoeconomics, microeconomic theory and application, new classical economics, public choice, public policy, transport economics and welfare economics. Research is a core activity and the department is closely associated with two of the Faculty of Business and Economics research centres, the Centre of Policy Studies/IMPACT Research Group and the Health Economics Unit of the Centre for Health Program Evaluation. More information about:
2. General policy statementThe 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 collectiona. LocationThe material acquired for the department is located at the Matheson Library on the Clayton campus and in the Caulfield, Clayton, Peninsula and Berwick libraries. b. LanguageGenerally only material in the English language is acquired. c. ClassificationMaterial acquired for the Department of Economics is classified using the Dewey Decimal Classification. d. FormatsNo format is excluded, although in practice the majority of the collection is monographs or serials, both print and electronic. e. Size of the collectionNumber of print serial titles received : Approximately 180 titles are received, the majority of which are held in the Matheson Library, but some 40 titles are held in the Caulfield Library. f. Significant electronic resourcesThe 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 Business and Economics is spent on these resources. These include Indexing and abstracting services
Fulltext databases / electronic journal suites
Subject gateway
35% of the library materials budget for the Faculty of Business and Economics is spent on serials, and 15% on electronic resources. g. Coverage of the collectionThe library resources acquired for the department in general cover all areas of the Dewey Decimal Classification in the 330s, economics, 381, internal commerce and 382, international commerce. The main areas of collecting for the Department of Economics are detailed below
In line with the department's undergraduate focus, a strong emphasis is given to providing a strong teaching collection to support undergraduate studies. The Caulfield, Gippsland, Peninsula and Matheson collections include all of the 330's and 381-382 as per the above table. The Gippsland and Peninsula libraries consist mainly of teaching collections. The Gippsland collection has good collections in the areas of general economics (especially Australian economics), labour economics, unemployment, employment of women, Marxism, taxation, general macroeconomics and international commerce. There are strong collections in Australian industrial relations, banking, investment and monetary economics, economics of the environment, tourism (especially in Australia) and corporations. Because of the large numbers of undergraduate students, texts and recommended reading materials are purchased in multiple copies to meet demand. The Gippsland collection is estimated at 13,000 volumes; that at Caulfield is estimated at 14,000 volumes; and that at Peninsula is estimated at 6,000 volumes. Currently there is only a very small collection of undergraduate text books in Berwick. Collections at the research level are held in Caulfield and Matheson according to subject emphasis, although Matheson has a broader subject coverage of research materials. Based on the demands of new teaching subjects, the emphasis of the collection may change in each of the campuses. Australian Materials The general policy is that materials relating to Australia and its involvement with major international economic organisations and regional economic zones will continue to be an important part of collection development. Therefore, Australian materials are collected as comprehensively as possible in Gippsland and Matheson. Asia Pacific Countries The Asia Pacific countries are major teaching and research areas and attempts are made to collect them at a comprehensive level, particularly in Caulfield and Matheson. Financial economics (332) is an important teaching and research subject in Caulfield. The IMF CD-ROM database, the "International Financial Statistics", is available only at Caulfield. Caulfield also has annual reports of selected Asian banks. Statistics Statistical materials in 310 (general), 314-316 (Europe, Asia and Africa) and 318 (North America) are an important reference collection in Matheson for both teaching and basic research and for the Reference collection. The Matheson library has built up a substantial collection of printed statistical resources at both the national and international level. This will continue to be maintained. However, it is envisaged that statistics in electronic formats such as CD-ROMs or online databases will be an important format as they allow data to be more easily manipulated using spreadsheets. For Australasian statistics, the Monash collection consists of the ABS print collection and the electronic version in full-text. The print ABS collection includes historical publications. Future Collection Development and TrendsEach of the libraries will continue to monitor their subject collections according to the demands and needs of the department of Economics. With networked electronic full-text and bibliographic databases, on site research materials is becoming less of an issue for libraries which do not collect comprehensively in the subjects concerned. The Business and Economics faculty team subject web sites will continue to link new full-text publications on the Internet to the Business and Economics team homepage and/or to the library catalogue. 4. Other significant Monash collections or resourcesMicroform Collection :
Government Publications : a full collection of current ABS publications in paper format are available in the Government Publications collection, as is a teaching level collection of some of the major government publication series such as those from OECD. The Asian Studies Research Collection (ASRCL): complements the collections for the vernacular languages in Indonesian, the Malay language, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and to a lesser extent Vietnamese. In addition, the ASRL also purchases some business/economics materials in the English language relating to Asia. Theses : Matheson has the most comprehensive collection of economics theses for Monash University available in manuscript and on microfiche. Rare Books Collection: there is a small collection of primary source historical Australian materials relating to communism in the 1940's and 1950's ( in pamphlets), depression, banking and finance and the trades industry. Donald Cochrane Library: located on the 7th floor of the Menzies building in Clayton, this is an independent library staffed and funded with the resources of the Faculty of Business and Economics. Caters for postgraduate and honours students and staff of the Faculty of Business and Economics only. Their collection strengths include business journals, Faculty theses (where received), annual reports and working papers from Australian and international universities obtained on a gratis basis. Collections Table(T = teaching level, R = research level)
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