from the Campuses of Monash University
In a staged move commencing on 30 January a number of the Library's departments and services began moving into the Information services Building (ISB).
The facilities offered by the ISB are already proving to be a valuable addition to the Library's operations, and areas freed up in the Sir Louis Matheson Library building are being redeployed.
The ISB is on Clayton campus between the original Main Library building (now the Sir Louis Matheson Library building) and the Education faculty. Entry to the ISB is through the main entrance to the Sir Louis Matheson Library building.
Now located in the ISB are the Asian Studies Research Library, the Music Library and Multimedia Services, Rare Books, the Technical Services Department, Library Administration and a Postgraduate study area.
Located on the lower ground floor, the ASRL is a specialist research collection with the primary emphasis in the fields of language, literature, the humanities and social sciences.
A team of resource librarians with the appropriate language skills is on hand to service the collections. The team consists our a Southeast Asian Studies Librarian (Helen Soemardjo), Chinese Studies Librarian (Dennis Kishere), Korean Studies Librarian (Jung Sim Kim), and Japanese Studies Librarian (Eiko Sakaguchi).
The ASRL provides a focus for Monash University Asian studies programs and facilitates Asian studies research. Materials located in the ASRL include vernacular books and periodicals in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese and Thai.
A brochure with more details on the ASRL, such as hours of opening, etc. can be obtained from any of the ASRL librarians.
For more information contact the ASRL on telephone 905 9127.
The Music Library and Multimedia services are located on the ground floor of the ISB. The Music Library was previously located in the Menzies building.
The services on the ground floor will include audio-visual services, microform services, tapes lecture services and services for users with disabilities.
There will also be a network training room to provide hands-on training for academic staff and students.
The new Rare Books area, on the first floor, will include a proper exhibition area, enhanced study facilities, and adequate compactus storage for all the rare and special collections currently housed in several locations within the Sir Louis Matheson Library building.
Other facilities on the first floor include reading areas, audio listening rooms and a special Judiac collection funded by a donation from Mr Israel Kipen.
The postgraduate study area, also on the first floor, is a new facility which will comprise study carrels, lockers and computers linked to the university network. Access will be by electronic swipe card and will be restricted to postgraduate students initially.
Located on the second floor, the new Technical Services area brings together the Technical Services staff from Clayton, Caulfield and Peninsula - this had not been possible before because of space constraints.
Also on the second floor is the office of the University Librarian and Library Administration.
The areas in the Sir Louis Matheson Library building which have been vacated are t be redeployed. For example, the original Technical Services area in the basement is to be converted to house a centralised compactus storage facility. This facility will accommodate up to 300 000 volumes of material from all the Monash University Library branches, thus alleviating storage and space problems in the branches.
Part of the Former Library Administration area will become the new office for the Library's commercial arm MONINFO. Another section will be remodelled to create a staff room, as the current staff room has been lost to the Arts Precinct tunnel.
Visitors, honorary and sessional staff will need to obtain a Monash University identity card before they can be provided with library borrowing privileges.
The card is available on request from Human Resources Services. The Departmental Chair should provide a written request for the issue of a card, specifying the nature of the visit and its duration. For further information contact Pauline Whalley, Human Resources Services on ext. 56089.
After receiving their identification card, visiting staff members can then use the card to obtain library borrowing privileges from any Branch Library.
Monash University Library is pleased to announce that people with accounts on the CCS1 or ITS-MENZ networks at Clayton may now access the Library's networked CD-ROM database.
Clayton campus staff will find enclosed with this issue of Library News a set of detailed instructions on how they may access the Library's CD-ROM network from their offices.
At present these instructions apply only to staff who are located on the Clayton campus. We hope to make the facility available to staff on other campuses at some later time.
It is important to recognise that the University has entered into contractual agreements with the vendors of most of the databases that are on the CD-ROM network. These agreements typically limit us with respect to (a) the geographic location of users accessing the network; and (b) the number of users that may access the network simultaneously. In most cases that number is eight, and may even be less for some databases. Increasing the numbers would incur additional licence fees, which can be extremely costly.
In order to avoid possible conflict between in-Library use (broadly equal to undergraduate use) and use from staff offices, the Library has decided to limit the number of users who may simultaneously access any networked database from their offices to 50% of the total number of users licensed to access that database. The implication of this is that you may not always be able to access a particular database when you want to - you may need t try again at some later time. We apologise in advance for this and hope you will understand. This decision will be reviewed at the end of June 1995 and in the meantime we will be monitoring the use statistics carefully. We also welcome your comments and feedback.
Meanwhile, it is most important that you log out of any database as soon as you have finished your search. This will give another user the opportunity to obtain access. The Library is investigating the possibility of setting up an automatic log-off procedure after a period of inactivity. However, at this stage we are entirely dependent on your cooperation and assistance in this regard.
Several of the databases on the CD-ROM network are also available to Monash University staff and students via the FirstSearch service. For further details about networked and online services please contact your Subject Librarian.
Hans W Groenewegen
Deputy University Librarian
email:Hans.groenewegen@lib.monash.edu.au
LEXIS, the world's largest legal database, is soon to be made available to Monash University Law faculty members. For more information contact Nick Pengelley, Law Librarian on 905 2605, email:nicholas.pengelley@lib.monash.edu.au
The Humanities and Social Sciences Library has subscribed to Analytica Moscow weekly press summaries - an electronic bulletin providing selective coverage of key political and economic developments in the former Soviet Union in over 30 Russian periodicals.
The bulletins are weekly reviews of the Russian press in English, written by staff of INCO, a research organisation based in the Russian Academy of Finance and working in North America in cooperation with the East-West project, Institute of Central/East European and Russian area studies, Careton University, Ottowa.
The bulletins can be accessed on the Monash CWIS via Lynx or MOSAIC. Select the LIBRARY option and then select ELECTRONIC JOURNALS under the SOME MONASH LIBRARY SERVICES option. The uniform resource locator (URL) for these journals is
http://www.monash.edu.au/journals/
For more information contact
Grace Giannini, ph. 905 5472,
email:grace.giannini@lib.monash.edu.au
Short courses are non-award courses conducted by Monash teaching departments and centres for a fee and are outside the University's normal academic programs. Consequently the participants on these courses are not eligible for Monash University student IDs and library privileges.
However, on payment of the appropriate fee, Library borrowing privileges can be arranged for the duration of the course.
3-month card $40
6-month card $70
12 -month card $120
For further details, contact the MONINFO Manager, Leigh Oldmeadow, on ext. 52690.
Rare Books plans to mount an exhibition in April to celebrate the opening of the new Information Services Building. This will be the first exhibition in the new exhibition area in the ISB. The exhibition will feature highlights from the Monash University Library collection, among them volumes of Gould's Birds and Patrick White's first novel Happy Valley, which was never republished.
For more information contact
Richard Overell,
Rare Books Librarian
Ph. 905 2689
email:richardo@lib.monash.edu.au
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Comments to Angela Prior
(Last updated 26/3/96)