A. Anticipated Future Trends
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.
B. Relationship to Resources Treated in Other Policy Statements
1. On Campus
The MSU Library collections that hold materials relevant to human resources and labor relations include Business (human resources, management, leadership, executives, organizational behavior), the Cesar Chavez Collection, Communications, Economics (unemployment,labor markets, social security, pension financing), Gender Studies (gay and lesbian employees, women in the workplace, sexual harassment, work-life balance), Government Documents, History (labor history - primarily U.S. and U.K.), International Area Studies (international human resources, globalization), Law (labor law, employment law, dispute resolution), Political Science, Psychology (industrial and organizational psychology, employee motivation), Special Collections (the American Radicalism collection in particular) and Sociology.
2. Regional or Network Resources
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.
