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Department of Materials Engineering1. The departmentThe Faculty of Engineering is made up of five departments and two schools and offers a range of disciplines in undergraduate and postgraduate courses on the Clayton, Gippsland and Malaysia campuses. There are also opportunities for undergraduates to study for double degrees with other faculties There are approximately 4100 students in the faculty, including 650 postgraduates (research and coursework), and an academic staff of 270 (2005 figures) The departments and schools within the faculty are: Chemical Engineering; Civil Engineering; Materials Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering which are all based on the Clayton campus; the Malaysian School of Engineering and the Gippsland School of Applied Science and Engineering. There is a common first year undergraduate program offered at the Clayton and Malaysian campuses after which students choose their area of specialisation. At Gippsland the Bachelor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and postgraduate programs in Maintenance and Reliability Engineering are delivered by the Gippsland School of Applied Sciences and Engineering which was formed in 2003 by the amalgamation of the Gippsland School of Engineering with the Gippsland School of Applied Science. Amended 6.06.06 The Department of Materials Engineering based on the Clayton campus offers undergraduate and postgraduate programs and has an active well funded, research program. There is an academic staff of 52 and a student load of 160 EFTSU, of which approximately 45 are postgraduate. Research areas within the department include: properties of engineering plastics, composites, rubbers and adhesives, polymer alloys and blends, corrosion and corrosion protection, ceramics and refractories, damage and remanent life in engineering materials, electrical and magnetic properties of alloys, ultra-high strength aluminium alloys, thermo-mechanical analysis of steels, metals and metal forming, wear and lifetime assessment of metals and ceramics, metal-matrix composites, biomaterials and tissue engineering, nanostructured materials, surface coatings and films, ceramic powder processing, superconducting ceramic oxide, analytical electron microscopy and synchrotron studies. The research centres and facilities involving the Department include: ARC Centre of Excellence
for Design in Light Metals (www.arclightmetals.org.au/) 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. LocationMaterial purchased for the Department of Materials Engineering is located predominantly in the Hargrave-Andrew Library on the Clayton campus. Material concerning the physics and chemistry of materials purchased for the School of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science is also located in the Hargrave-Andrew Library. Material in the area of ceramic technologies is also purchased for the Department of Chemical Engineering. Relevant material purchased for the School of Mathematics and Statistics is also located in the Hargrave Andrew Library. Some older low use monographs are housed in high density storage in the Matheson Library. b. LanguageGenerally only material in the English language is acquired. c. Classification usedMaterial acquired for the School of Physics & Materials Engineering is classified using the Dewey Decimal Classification. The exception is any resources in the mathematics area received after about 1982 on the Clayton campus. These are classified using the Monash/M.O.S. mathematics classification, a variant of the American Mathematical Society's Mathematics Subject Classification scheme. d. Formats collectedWhile no format is excluded, in practice the greater part of the collection is monographs and serials, printed and, increasingly, electronic. Due to the nature of research in the faculty serial literature is seen as vital and so a high proportion of the library budget for the faculty is spent on serials. e. Size of the collectionIncreasingly the emphasis in collection development is on electronic resources. The number of scientific serials received in print continues to decline while the number of electronic titles increases. Many electronic titles now come as packages from publishers and individual titles are not assigned to particular departments. There are more than 2000 electronic serials available in Engineering and related areas. The Monash University Library subscribes to Australian Standards Online, which provides electronic access to all Australian Standards provided by the Standards Association of Australia. There is also online access to the IEEE standards. The Hargrave-Andrew Library has a print set of the American Society for Testing and Materials standards. Other standards are bought as required, increasingly in electronic form. f. Significant electronic resourcesIn addition to the extensive electronic journal collection resources in electronic format include databases, electronic books, encyclopaedias and electronic book collections such as Knovel and Engnetbase. There are some stand-alone CD-ROM databases that are only accessible within a particular branch. An increasing proportion of the budget for library materials for the Faculty of Engineering is spent on these resources and where practical high demand items are purchased in electronic form. Major electronic resources include: Databases
The library's database pages provide listings and links to databases organised by subject area. Full test book collectionsMany hundreds of reference texts and handbooks are now available electronically. These are bought individually or as part of extensive electronic book collections such as:
Full text journal collections :A number of substantial publisher based electronic journal collections are subscribed to. These packages deliver access to the entire journal list of the publisher delivering resources not previously available and so considerably extending the research collection. Amongst the publishers with whom such arrangements apply are Elsevier (ScienceDirect); Springer; Wiley; Blackwells. The American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Physics.:
Online reference works :Most major reference works are now available electronically, amongst them:
Around 80% of the library materials budget for the Faculty of Engineering is spent on serials, databases and electronic resources, and 20% on printed monographs. g. Coverage of the collectionThe library resources acquired for the department cover in general areas of the Dewey Decimal Classification in 620.1, engineering mechanics and materials, and 666-669, chemical engineering of specific materials. The major areas of collecting for the Department of Materials Engineering are as follows:
The Gippsland book collection is adequate to support undergraduate teaching, especially when used in conjunction with the wide range of electronic journals and databases available. There is also a well-used intercampus delivery system for items held at other campuses. 4. Other significant Monash collections or resourcesSESTICON: As a member of SESTICON (South Eastern Scientific and Technical Information Consortium), Hargrave-Andrew cooperates with the member libraries covering this subject to consolidate and maximise holdings, thus providing the most effective access to information resources. Selected serial titles in areas of shared research interest are also circulated among the SESTICON libraries. (More information about SESTICON available lib.monash.edu.au/hal/sesticon.html) Collections Table(T = teaching level, R = research level)
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