Collection Development

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Collection Development

Subject Policy Statement - BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

 

A. Purpose and Program Description

The Libraries seek to support research and teaching in the School of Biological Sciences . The Collection supports the needs of the educational programmes as major or minor offered by the School, at both undergraduate and the postgraduate levels leading to the BSc, MSc and the research-based MPhil and PhD degrees.

Working in collaboration with departments from other faculties e.g. Law, Engineering and Law, the School offers courses specialized in biology, biotechnology, ecology and biodiversity, environmental protection, food and nutritional science, microbiology, infectious diseases and endocrine research.

Research Focus
Teaching and research in Biological Sciences through the doctoral level are supported mainly in four streams: (a) Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Sciences (b) Ecology and Biodiversity (c) Endocrinology and (d) Microbiology. These include various fields of study: molecular cell biology, developmental biology, marine, terrestrial and aerial science, microbial, animal and agricultural biotechnology, bioactive food ingredients, food and nutrition, Chinese medicine, nutrigenomics, bioinformatics, ecology, conservation, and evolutionary biology in animals, plants and microbes.

Multi-disciplinary treatment of subjects
They are usually courses that are concerned with the impact of areas on medicine, health ageing, genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics, plant pathology, biotechnology, environmental control and in particular, infectious diseases, cancer, immunology, infertility and endocrine research.

User Groups
Primary users are faculty members, undergraduates and postgraduates major in the subject. It also serves users from other Departments who work in collaboration and/or have study interests related to the subject e.g. Law, Civil Engineering and the Biochemistry Department.

 

B. General Selection Guidelines (See Classed Analysis)

Overall, the Libraries' existing collection and acquisitions commitment, based upon available resources, and its collection goal for the subject areas are at the Research level.

 

C. Specific Delimitations

  1. Formats collected: Extensive variety of formats are collected. We collect monographs, annuals, reference tools, scholarly series, periodicals, CD-ROMs and other electronic tools, and videocassettes extensively ; textbooks and dissertations (other than HKU dissertations), selectively.
  2. Imprint Dates Collected: We collect current publications extensively, and earlier materials, selectively.
  3. Chronological Focus: Contemporary. No limit to coverage in terms intellectual content but emphasis is on collecting most recent materials.
  4. Languages Collected: We collect English language materials extensively non-English language materials selectively, with translations into English preferred.
  5. Place of Publication: We collect extensively materials from North European and United Kingdom and other materials selectively.