Computer Science Collection Policy

OVERVIEW

subject description and guidelines

 

  • The Libraries seek to support research, informational, and instruction needs in the field of computer science and information science from the undergraduate to graduate to post-graduate level. The library collects research journals of most relevant societies and high quality, relevant, and high use peer-reviewed journals published by commercial and non-profit publishers. The focus is on electronic format; print subscriptions are retained when no online exists or where there are licensing restrictions. The vast majority of current conferences and journals held are electronic and may or may not include deep archives; therefore paper backfiles are kept in the annex for rapid scanning and document delivery. More electronic back files are being added each year. Trade journals are collected, but not comprehensively and electronic access is always sought. Many computer and information science publications are online, and most are collected to comprehensiveness. This includes the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Lectures Notes in Control and Information, Computer Science Technical Reports on eCommons, IEEE xplore, and Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Digital Library of Engineering and Computer Science. E-Book collections are aggressively collected and include Springer books, Safari O'Reilly Higher Education, and Knovel, resulting in thousands of books being available online. Conference literature is very important in computer science, and most are online. All are cataloged for discovery purposes and we have subscriptions when there is a fee. Databases leading to the discovery of these resources are also collected. These include Engineering Village, IEEE xplore, and Web of Science among others. Over the years skyrocketing journal prices have forced cancellations and the journal titles or databases with low use have been targeted. The library has approval plans with many publishers to supply computer science books to the collection, which come automatically. Since 2010 the majority of these books are supplied electronically instead of in print. We will buy print books on demand and when not available online.

 

COLLECTION SCOPE

collection strength

 

  • Overall, the collecting goals for Engineering are for dissertation-level research and undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education.

 

collection level

 

  • research 

 

geographical guidelines

 

  • Most materials in the collection pertain to engineering published in English in North American, Europe, and Asia. Foreign-language material is collected infrequently.

 

areas of significant geographic coverage

country (self-governing)

  • Canada 
  • Great Britain 
  • United States of America 

 

transnational region

  • Europe 

 

language guidelines

 

  • English is the main language of scholarly communication in Computer Science. Publications in other languages are acquired very selectively.

 

language

 

  • English 

 

chronological guidelines

 

  • Computer science has been collected since 1965 when the department was formed.

 

exclusions

 

  • Non-english material is not usually collected. Some bilingual material has been collected in the past.

 

material types

 

  • Computer Science emphasizes scholarly communication through academic and specialized journals, trade journals, books and e-books; conferences, standards, patents, databases, preprints, nd technical reports. There are some two million technical reports from various government agencies on microfiche at the Library Annex, which can be scanned.

 

COLLECTION CONTEXT

housed in

 

  • Clark Physical Sciences Library 
  • Engineering Library 
  • Library Annex 
  • Mathematics Library 
  • Uris Library 

 

related library subject collection

 

 

AFFILIATIONS

academic department

 

  • Communication (COMM)
  • Computer Science (COM S)
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
  • Operations Research and Information Engineering (OR&IE)
  • Science and Technology Studies (S&TS)

 

graduate field/program

 

  • Applied Mathematics
  • Biometry
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Biology
  • Computational Science and Engineering
  • Computer Science
  • Information Science
  • Mathematics
  • Operations Research and Information Engineering
  • Statistics
  • Systems Engineering

 

academic unit

 

  • Cognitive Science 

 

RESPONSIBILITY

library contact

  • Powell, Jill  -  Engineering Librarian