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Faculty of Information Technology1. The facultyThe Faculty of Information Technology provides information technology teaching and research across seven campuses – Clayton, Caulfield, Gippsland, Berwick, Peninsula, Malaysia and South Africa. The Faculty is structured as seven campus-based schools which offer a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and subjects to approximately 5,000 students, mostly on the Caulfield and Clayton campuses. Of these, approximately 1,500 are postgraduate students. There are 220 academic staff in the faculty. Following a major review of the faculty during 2004, significant changes to both the structure of the faculty (from eight discipline based schools) and its undergraduate programs commenced during 2005. Research interests in the faculty cover the breadth of computing and information technology and include: Berwick School of Information Technology – multimedia applications in teaching and learning, multimedia narrative, animation, game design and development, creating content in digital environments, societal implications of multimedia, cultural issues in e-commerce, mobile agents, multimedia software development, multimedia databases. Caulfield School of Information Technology – community networking, information and telecommunications needs, knowledge management, decision support systems, information systems development, record keeping and metadata, enterprise and interpersonal information flow, information systems management, corporate e-business. Clayton School of Information Technology – audiovisual information processing and digital communications, computing education, electronic media art, distributed systems and software engineering, optimisation and constraint solving, reasoning under uncertainty, suburban ad hoc network, user modelling and natural language, digital systems hardware and architecture, logic and theory. In the business systems area it covers analysis, design, development and application of information technology tools for business management. It focuses on leading-edge research in different areas of business and IT, including finance, corporate, health, public sector, industry and logistics. Gippsland School of Information Technology – computer-mediated communication and multimedia courseware, image and signal processing, multimedia communications, operations and production management, optimisation techniques, intelligent systems Peninsula School of Information Technology – computer and network security, computer-mediated education, distributed information systems engineering, health informatics, multimedia and information management, software systems and middleware, peer to peer computing, mobile and ubiquitous computing. 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 majority of the collection is located in the Caulfield and Hargrave-Andrew libraries, as the majority of the teaching and research students are located on the Caulfield and Clayton campuses. However, the collections at Gippsland, Berwick and Peninsula are growing and consist mainly of recently published material. Much of the older monograph material in the area of librarianship, records and information centres is located in the Matheson Library. Teaching in this area on the Gippsland and Clayton campuses has ceased, and is now done from the Caulfield campus, where newly acquired material and the majority of print serials are located. Material in the area of historical bibliography and publishing is also collected by the National Centre for Australian Studies (Faculty of Arts), which offers a Master of Arts in Publishing. Extensive material in the area of business systems is also housed in the Matheson library. Part of the Clayton School of Information Technology was formerly part of the (now) Faculty of Business and Economics, and material in this area is still collected by the library. The library also collects material in the area of accounting information systems for the Department of Accounting (Faculty of Business and Economics). The library also collects in the areas of logic and game theory for the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and this material is located in the Hargrave-Andrew Library on the Clayton campus. The Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering (Faculty of Engineering) also acquires material in the area of robotics. b. LanguageGenerally only English language material is acquired. c. Classification used.Material acquired for the Faculty of Information Technology, in all formats, 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. There has also been some conversion of material from the Dewey Decimal Classification to the Monash/M.O.S. classification, so that about 95% of mathematics material is in the latter system. d. FormatsNo format is excluded. Monographs and serials, both print and electronic, are the main sources. Material on CD-ROM, DVD and disk is also purchased, as often these accompany texts. e. Size of the collectionEstimated current size of the monograph collection : The Gippsland collection is estimated at about 11,000 volumes; Berwick is estimated at 2,600 volumes; Caulfield is estimated at 18,500 volumes, the Hargrave-Andrew Library is estimated at 18,000 volumes, Peninsula 8,200 volumes and Matheson 4000 volumes. Number of print serial titles received : About 310 current print serial titles are received. Of these the Caulfield Library and the Hargrave-Andrew Library each hold approximately 135. The library has a standing order to the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series in electronic format and subscriptions to the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) (both print and electronic) and IEEE (Institution of Electrical & Electronics Engineers) (electronic only) publications. The Monash University Library is an institutional member of the Library Association, American Library Association and the Australian Library and Information Association to enable blanket order purchase of serial publications and notification of new books published by these organisations. 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 Information Technology is spent on these resources, with the benefit of increased web-based access to electronic resources by both students and staff. These include Indexing and abstracting services
Fulltext databases / electronic journal suites
In 2004 10% of the library materials budget for the Faculty of Information Technology was spent on print serials and 33% on electronic resources. g. Coverage of the collectionThe library resources acquired for the faculty cover in general all areas of the Dewey Decimal Classification from 001 to 029. This includes knowledge and the book, computer science, bibliography, and library and information science. The main areas of collecting for the Faculty of Information Technology are detailed below
The Hargrave-Andrew Library’s collecting strengths in the Information Technology area include:
Gippsland Library mainly collects to support undergraduate teaching with its particular strengths following the undergraduate courses. In particular there are notable areas of collecting in various programming languages, with a growing emphasis on Java, and a decreasing emphasis on C++. A minor section but one worthy of note is the collection of texts on the programming language Python. There is a significant collection on web basics now being supplemented with more advanced Web technologies such as XML. Other particular areas of note include a section on artificial intelligence and expert systems, the .NET suite of technologies and a developing section on data mining. While there are scattered areas at postgraduate level, no sections are yet developed in sufficient strength to justify the designation of research collection. Courses focusing on multimedia computing and associated technologies are taught on the Berwick campus, with scope for the expansion of the collection in the areas of multimedia technology and network computing. Electronic commerce is also a rapidly developing area that needs constant acquisition of resources. The collections at Caulfield support teaching and research in the growing areas of electronic commerce, multimedia and information management which are being taught in a very interdisciplinary way across a range of faculties. Other areas of the collections at Caulfield consist predominantly of text and recommended reading material with the aim of supporting undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in the areas of commercial and industrial information systems (School of Information Management and Systems) and the design, construction and programming of computer equipment (School of Computer Science and Software Engineering). The collection at Peninsula campus is being developed to provide additional resources in the areas of net-centric computing, computer security, operating systems, business information systems and web-based systems. The electronic databases, which are almost universally available, are providing a wealth of material for students and staff doing advanced coursework and research and make up for the relatively limited print research collection. 4. Other significant Monash collections or resourcesRare Books collection has a significant collection of books on the history of books in all aspects of their production, selling and their reading, as well as a representative collection of private press books. (Rare Books available lib.monash.edu.au/rare/) Microform collection:
Collections Table(T = teaching level, R = research level)
Amendment history
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