Collection development must follow and, whenever possible, anticipate major trends in business. It must also monitor curricular developments in the Broad College of Business, The School of Human Resources and Labor Relations, and in other departments when they impact the business collection.
The business collection will continue to be an important part of the MSU Libraries collection. As the College of Business continues to provide Executive Education, weekend MBA programs, and virtual classes, the issue of providing the use of library collections to distance learners has become increasingly important. In addition, many faculty and students prefer to access materials without having to come into the library.
Data and text mining are of interest and continue to be a growing area of need. The need to purchase datasets and the ability to text mine content will continue to increase.
Human Resources and Labor Relations will continue to be an area of strength at MSU, both within the College of Social Science and as a subject covered across the University. The School is expected to remain a signature program at MSU and will be expanding its course offerings domestically and internationally within the next several years. This multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary subject deals with all aspects of the employment relationship and touches almost every other subject to some extent. The discipline is constantly changing and being enlarged by conditions and events in the economy, legislation, case law, technology, social forces, and international affairs. The current interest in international human resources management and labor relations as well as strategic human resource management are currently and will continue to be important areas of interest in the field.
1. Government Documents
This collection holds much information that is useful to both the business and labor researcher. Therefore it is important for the business and labor bibliographers to be very familiar with the resources in government documents. Aside from basic reference works, there is very little overlap in collecting.
2. Main Library Reference
It was practice in the past to have agreements with Reference concerning expensive reference works, which would be purchased by one unit and sent to the other unit when a new edition arrived. Known as “travelling reference books”, these were ultimately housed in Main stacks after being in the reference collections Business. This practice has mostly been discontinued for the following reasons:
a. One site was using information that was not up-to-date
b. Many business reference questions can be answered using online resources
c. It is more efficient to have all business resources in one place.
It was decided therefore that for business questions, people would be referred from Main Reference to Business.
3. Economics
Economics is collected in the Main Library.
Occasionally, some areas overlap with the business collection
(transportation, an important logistics and supply-chain management
topic for Marketing, is one example) and the labor collection (unemployment,labor markets, social security, pension financing)
4. Cesar Chavez Collection
Collected in the Main Library, Cesar Chavez is well know in the labor arena for his work with migrant workers.
5. Communications
Communications is collected in the Main Library and overlaps both Business and Labor.
6. Gender Studies
Collected in the Main Library, Gender Studies overlaps Labor (gay and lesbian employees, women in the workplace, sexual harassment, work-life balance)
7. History (labor history - primarily U.S. and U.K.)
8. International Area Studies (international human resources, globalization)
9. Law (labor law, employment law, dispute resolution)
Regular law material is collected in the Law Library. However, we do have some that are related to other subject areas like Labor, Africana, etc.
10. Political Science
11. Psychology (industrial and organizational psychology, employee motivation)
12. Special Collections (the American Radicalism collection in particular)
13. Sociology
14. Regional or network resources, if any
The University of Michigan Kresge Business Administration Library has a strong business collection except in hospitality, which we have a strong collection in. There is hope to create a formal cooperative collection sharing with them.
Due to the specialized nature of its holdings, the HR/LR collection in the MSU Libraries is presently the only one of its kind in the State of Michigan. However, within the state, the Reuther Library and Archives at Wayne State University contains very rich holdings of mostly primary source materials related to the labor movement and labor unions. Within the CIC, the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin have substantial LR/HR collections.