Collection Development Policy
Economics

PROGRAMS AND CLIENTELE SUPPORTED:

The Department of Economics within the College of Arts & Letters offers the Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. Most graduate students enroll in the doctoral sequence, with a relatively few later opting instead to conclude at the M.A. thesis level. Concentrations at the undergraduate level include pre-professional (law, MBA); labor economics; international development; and public policy. Graduate-level emphases include the above plus industrial organization; money and banking; history of economic thought and methodology; and statistical/econometric methods. At the graduate level there is purposeful recruitment of foreign students, many from Central and South America.

ECONOMICS LIAISON:

Gay Dannelly
University Libraries
(574) 631-3282
Dannelly.1@nd.edu

CONSPECTUS:  Yes

GENERAL COLLECTING GUIDELINES:

Languages:  Primarily English language. A moderate number of Spanish titles are acquired, given the graduate student enrollment and interests. Requests from individual faculty fluent in non-English languages are routinely honored. Banking, financial, and national accounts statistics are acquired in a wide variety of original languages, with the emphasis being on numeric content.

Chronological:  In general, emphasis is on current methods and policies; but labor history, history of industrial development, and history of economic thought clearly encompass an interval of several centuries. Continual need is expressed for statistical time series of up to 100 years' retrospective coverage. Data are sometimes needed for foreign countries which did not reliably publish such reports during the time period at issue.

Geographical:  No geographic restrictions apply. Interest extends from U.S. economic policy, trade and labor relations, to the European industrial revolution, to banking practices throughout most of the world. International students commonly pursue thesis topics on economic/rural development issues pertinent to their home countries. Some difficulty is encountered in fulfilling requests for materials published far outside the U.S. and western Europe.

Treatment of subject:  Scholarly and authoritative works are selected and are reliably supplied by the North American approval plan. A very few works aimed at the novice reader, such as guides to economic terminology, are added. Textbooks and handbooks are rarely added, except for new editions in econometrics.

Types of materials:  Print materials include monographs, journals, research annuals and conference proceedings, indexes to journals, book reviews, and working papers, and a growing number of statistical annuals and handbooks. Works in series such as from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution from an important adjunct. With enhanced capabilities in DeBartolo Hall, a few faculty are integrating video titles into their courses. Data tapes and diskettes are purchased in close coordination with other units as described below.

 

COORDINATION INFORMATION:

Numerous other units on campus are consulted on a frequent basis to assure that Economics funds are spread as widely as possible with no duplication. Close coordination has been imperative in that heretofore, Economics has lacked supplemental endowment support.

The subject librarian for the College of Business Administration and for the Department of Economics is the same person; those subjects are interwoven closely but harmoniously. The library coordinator within the Department of Finance and Business Economics is often consulted on titles that are equally of interest to Economics. As Business has more versatile endowment funds, many titles are thereby acquired to the benefit of both departments.

Several Economics faculty members are cross-appointed in the Kellogg Institute. Coordination with the librarian in charge of the Kellogg Information Center is essential in many cases, which often involve attempts to purchase materials published outside the U.S. and western Europe.

The librarian in charge of the newly- opened Business Information Center (BIC) is consulted in all cases involving electronic data files and indexes. The BIC has as a general goal the networked access to every one of its databases, with all faculty and students from Economics fully entitled to usage.

The Government Documents depository unit in Hesburgh Library (United States, United Nations, European Community) is consulted on a nearly daily basis for availability of national accounts statistics, legislative hearings, and many other resources. All new graduate students in Economics receive a thorough orientation to the Documents section.

Many Economics graduate students have part-time employment or internships in the Laboratory for Social Research, which is consulted several times per year with regard to availabilty and potential purchase of computer tapes and diskettes to benefit dissertation research. This unit is well-positioned to determine which data are available free of charge through memberships in consortia and via reciprocal lending.

COLLECTING LEVELS:

LC Class	Subject	Collecting Level
H	Social Sciences, general works	3
HA	Statistics	3
HB	Economic Theory	4
HC	Economic History	4
HD	Industry & Labor	4
HE	Transportation	2
n/a	Data files (electronic)	2
n/a	Government reports/data	3

 

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS:

The Libraries changed in academic year 1995/96 to a new "approval" vendor for monographs (Blackwell North America) who is offering greatly enhanced coverage of Economics as opposed to the previous vendor. Efforts continue to assure fully dependable coverage of a few key publishers who were not represented in the previous arrangement.

"Privatization" of much U.S. government data previously available to the general public has made the Government Documents unit indispensable to the entire Economics Department. Documents staff devote many hours to devising alternative methods to obtain what used to arrive routinely. This often entails intricate work to identify the specific titles, and coverage dates, to be purchased by the Business/Economics Librarian.

In prior years Economics had been one of the only major units without a specific library endowment. An endowment for Economics has just been announced and details of its magnitude and start date remain to be pinpointed, but provide grounds for planning an enriched collection in future years.

 

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