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Faculty of Information Technology

1. The faculty

The Faculty of Information Technology provides information technology teaching and research across six campuses – Clayton, Caulfield, Gippsland, Berwick, Malaysia and South Africa. The Faculty is structured as six campus-based schools which offer a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and subjects to approximately 2,400 students, mostly on the Caulfield and Clayton campuses. Of these, approximately 750 are postgraduate students. There are 180 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. Further to this restructure, teaching on the Peninsula campus ceased at the end of 2006. A further restructure of faculty postgraduate programs commenced during 2008.

Research interests in the faculty cover the breadth of computing and information technology and include the following research centres:
Centre for Decision Support and Enterprise Systems Research
Research Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics
Centre for Distributed Systems and Software Engineering

and research groups:
Audiovisual Information Processing and Digital Communications
Centre for Community Networking Research
Centre for Electronic Media Art
Computer Education Research Group
Information and Telecommunications Needs Research
Information Systems Development Group
Information Systems Management and e-Business Group
Knowledge Management Research Program
Monash Data Mining Centre
Monash Regional Centre for Information and Communications Technology
Optimisation and Constraint Solving
Reasoning Under Uncertainty Group
Records Continuum Research Group
Suburban Ad Hoc Networks
User Modeling and Natural Language

Academic staff are also involved in the Monash e-Research Centre and the Cooperative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology.

More information about:

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

The 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 and Berwick are growing and consist mainly of recently published material. The Faculty ceased teaching on the Peninsula campus at the end of 2006, but a small collection of generally older materials remains.

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. Language

Generally 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. However from 2006, all new material purchased was classified using the latest edition of the Dewey Decimal classification.

d. Formats

No 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 collection

Estimated current size of the monograph collection : The Gippsland collection is estimated at about 12,000 volumes; Berwick is estimated at 3,100 volumes; Caulfield is estimated at 21,500 volumes, the Hargrave-Andrew Library is estimated at 22,000 volumes, Peninsula 6,000  volumes and Matheson 9,000 volumes.

Number of print serial titles received : About 240 current print serial titles are received. Of these the Caulfield Library holds 101 and the Hargrave-Andrew Library holds 124.

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 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 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

  • ALISA
  • Compendex
  • Inspec
  • LISA
  • MathSciNet
  • Web of Science

Fulltext databases / electronic journal suites

  • ABI/Inform Global
  • ACM Digital Library
  • Business Source Premier
  • Computer Database
  • Expanded Academic ASAP
  • IEEE Xplore
  • ProQuest Computing
  • ProQuest Telecommunications
  • ScienceDirect
  • SpringerLink
  • Safari tech books online

In 2007 12% of the library materials budget for the Faculty of Information Technology was spent on print serials and 52% on electronic resources.

g. Coverage of the collection

The 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

003 Systems
004 Data processing, Computer science
004.6 Internet; Computer networks
005 Computer programming, programs, data
005.4 Systems programming
005.7 Data in computer systems
005.8 Data security
006 Special computer methods eg computer graphics
006.3 Artificial intelligence
006.7 Multimedia systems
020 Library and information sciences
021 Relationships of libraries, archives, record centres
022 Physical plant administration
023 Personnel administration
025 Operations of libraries, archives, information centres
026 Libraries, archives, information centres in specific subjects and disciplines
027 General libraries, archives, information centres
028 Reading and use of other information media
070.5 Publishing
362.10285 Health informatics
384.3 Computer communication
410.2 Computational linguistics
Mos 511.2 Logic and foundation
Mos 517.33 Game theory
519.3 Game theory
610.285 Medical telematics
620.00452 Reliability
621.367 Image processing
621.39 Computer engineering
629.8312 Control theory
629.89 Computer control
629.892 Robotics
657.0285 Accounting information systems
658.05 Electronic commerce
658.15 Financial management
658.404 Project management
658.478 Computer security
794.8 Computer games

The Hargrave-Andrew Library’s collecting strengths in the Information Technology area include:

  • systems: operations research; systems theory, analysis, design, optimization; models (simulation) applied to real-world systems
  • data processing: selection and use of computer hardware; hardware and programs in electronic data processing; electronic computers; electronic digital computers; computer systems; central processing units; computer reliability; general computer performance evaluation
  • computer programming, programs, data: text processing; software reliability; compatibility; portability
  • special computer methods: artificial intelligence; computer pattern recognition; computer sound synthesis; computer graphics
  • operations research; systems theory, analysis, design, optimisation; models (simulation) applied to real-world systems
  • computer communication
  • electronics and communications engineering
  • management: of production, of materials, of distribution
  • reliability

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. 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 and the design, construction and programming of computer equipment. Material is also collected in the areas of net-centric computing, computing security, operating systems, business information systems and web-based systems.

4. Other significant Monash collections or resources

Rare 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:

  • Archives of British Publishers on Microfilm (489 reels and 55 fiche),
  • The nineteenth century (1506 fiche),
  • Records of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1554-1920 (115 reels)

Collections Table

(T = teaching level, R = research level)

DDC Description Caulfield Matheson HAL Gippsland Peninsula Berwick
003 Systems R T R T T -
004 Data processing, computer science R T R T T T
004.6 Internet; Computer networks R T R T T T
005 Computer programming, programs, data R T R T T T
005.4 Systems programming T T T T T T
005.7 Data in computer systems T T R T T T
005.8 Data security T - R - T -
006 Special computer methods eg computer graphics R T R T T T
006.3 Artificial intelligence T - R T T -
006.7 Multimedia systems T

-

T T

T

T
020 Library and information sciences T

-

- T - -
021 Relationships of libraries, archives, record centres

T

- - - - -
022 Physical plant administration

-

- - - - -
023 Personnel administration - T - - - -
025 Operations of libraries, archives, information centres T T - - - -
026 Libraries, archives, information centres in specific disciplines - T - - - -
027 General libraries, archives, record centres T T - - - -
028 Reading and use of other information media - T - - T -
070.5 Publishing

T

T - T T -
362.10285 Health informatics

-

- - - T -
384.3 Computer communication

-

- T T - -
410.2 Computational linguistics

-

T T - - -
Mos 511.2 Logic and foundations

-

T R - - -
Mos 517.33 Game theory

-

- T - - -
519.3 Game theory

-

- - - - -
610.285 Medical telematics

-

- T - T -
620.00452 Reliability

-

- T - - -
621.367 Image processing

-

- R - - -
621.39 Computer engineering T - T T T -
629.8312 Control theory - - T - - -
629.89 Computer control T - R T - -
629.892 Robotics - - R T - -
657.0285 Accounting information systems T - T - T -
658.05 Electronic Commerce T - T T T T
658.15 Financial Management T - T T T T
658.404 Project Management T - T T T T
658.478 Computer security T - T -

T

-
794.8 Computer games T - T -

-

T

Amendment history

February 2001
First issued

December 2002
Updated

June 2005
Updated

October 2005
Updated

April 2008
Updated

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