Washington University in St. Louis Collection Development Policy

Library: Olin
Subject: Mathematics
Collection: General
Date Revised: April 2020
Subject Librarian: Eliot Boden

 

1. General purpose:

• Support for research and teaching in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics
• Overview from 2020:
  • Faculty and Researchers:
    • 29 full time tenure or tenure track faculty, 1 lecturer,  and 6 postdoctoral lecturers.
    • Research is funded by NSF and other sources; many statistics faculty collaborate with researchers in other departments, especially WUSM, so some NIH funding; a few faculty collaborate with engineering, physics, etc.
  • Graduate education:
    • PhD or MA in both Mathematics and Statistics
    • 68 graduate students; 24 graduates students added in Fall 2019
    • The American Mathematical Society (AMS) divides math departments with doctoral programs into groups based on “scholarly quality of program faculty.”  Washington University is in the highest ranked group.
  • Undergraduate education:
    • Majors in Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics.  Approximately 100 new majors added each year;  274 total declared math majors (April 2020).
    • Math courses are required for many disciplines including business, economics, engineering, sciences, etc. 
    • Math faculty have very heavy teaching loads; the department teaches nearly 5,000 students each year; it teaches more student hours in the Fall semester than any other department in Arts & Sciences, and is consistently among the top five departments for student hours taught in Spring semesters. 
    • University College (within the College of Arts & Sciences) offers several courses and curricula for BS in Mathematics or Applied Mathematics and a Certificate in Applied Mathematics.

2. Subjects excluded:

• Minimal level (1):
  • Popular Works
  • Recreational Mathematics
  • Historical Works
  • Teaching
  • Accounting
• Instructional Support Level; Introductory (3A):
  • Applied Mathematics and Statistics
  • See Overlap

3. Overlap with other collections or subjects:

• Collecting beyond the 3A level in applied mathematics and statistics is left to the applications areas, such as:
  • Business
  • Biology
  • Physics
  • Biology
  • Medicine/Public Health
  • Economics
  • Anthropology
  • Psychology
  • Engineering (including Computer Science and Systems Science & Mathematics), etc.
• Computer science is Engineering (not Mathematics)
• History and philosophy of mathematics are left for history and philosophy to collect when they want to. We probably have a Basic Information Level (2) collection.
• Teaching of mathematics is left to Education when they choose to collect in that area. We probably have a Minimal Level (1) collection.

4. Languages included and excluded:

• Almost entirely English
• Occasionally:
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Spanish
  • Russian languages on faculty request

5. Geographical limitations:

None

6. Chronological limits:

None; history/philosophy of mathematics collected only minimal-basic level

 

7. Retrospective acquisition:

Older materials are used and considered valuable but they are not actively acquired except in special cases, for example, to replace important lost and missing items which are not available via MOBIUS.  Although it hasn’t happened, I could imagine retrospective acquisition if a new faculty member were hired who works in some area we have not collected before.

8. Types of material collected and excluded:

• Excluded:
  • ​K-12 Textbooks
  • Test Preparation Guides
  • Reprints when we own the original
  • Dissertations from other universities
  • Newsletters
• Some textbooks are desired, usually graduate level or to use for examples for teaching.  The library does not actively acquire those but will occasionally add gifts or acquire on request.

9. Other factors to consider:

• Monographs:
  • We buy monographs on request from WUSTL community
  • Some come on our automatic-ship profile, but very few (30 books in fy13)
• We buy almost all volumes in American Mathematical Society Graduate Studies in Mathematics book series
• We buy all Springer monographs and book series in their annual ebooks mathematics & statistics packages (2005+).
• Generally, we do not duplicate monographs included in the CRCnetbase or Safari Technical Ebooks subscriptions.
• We buy ebook format instead of paper if available on DRM-free platform, such as Springer, ScienceDirect, Wiley Online Library, Cambridge, World Scientific, deGruyter, JSTOR, etc.
  • We do not duplicate ebooks in paper, except by mistake.
• Journals and standing orders:
  • We subscribe online-only when available with post-cancellation access guarantees and preservation mechanisms.
• A fairly high percentage of journal articles are available in preprint format on author websites or ArXiv, so sometimes Research Level work can be done without access to all subscriptions which would otherwise be needed.

10. Subjects and Collecting Levels:

(Except where noted above most of math is at level 3B (Advanced Study) or 4 (Comprehensive).  Areas indicated in red italics are more likely to be level 4 since those are current research areas for faculty).

0 - Out of Scope
1 - Minimal Level
2 - Basic Informational Level
3A - Introductory Study
3B - Advanced Study
4 - Research
5 - Comprehensive

 

Level	Call No.	Subjects
0	QA75-76	Computer science; see Engineering
1	QA101-145	Elementary mathematics.  Arithmetic:
	QA150...QA272	Algebra
	QA150	Periodicals, societies, congresses, serials collections, yearbooks
	QA152-QA155	Textbooks
	QA157	Problems, exercises, examinations
	QA162	Abstract algebra
	QA164	Combinatorics, algebraic combinatorics
	QA166	Graph theory
	QA169	Homological algebra
	QA171	Theory of groups
	QA171.5	Lattice theory
	QA184...QA20	5 Linear and multilinear algebras. Matrices
	QA184	General works
	QA186	Vector spaces
	QA188-QA199	Matrices
	QA200	Vector and tensor algebras
	QA211...QA224	Theory of equations
	QA219	Graph algebra
	QA221	Approximation theory
	QA241...QA255	Theory of numbers
	QA247	Algebraic fields. Algebraic numbers
	QA248	Foundations of arithmetic. Set theory
	QA252.3	Lie Algebra, commutative algebra
	QA267...QA272	Machine Theory. Abstract Machines. Abstract Automata
	QA273...QA275	Probabilities
	QA274	Stochastic Processes
	QA275	Theory of errors
	QA276...QA299	Mathematical Statistics, longitudinal data analysis, Bayesian smoothing, survival analysis, numerical algorithms, applications of statistics to medicine
	QA278	Multivariate analysis
	QA292	Sequences
	QA297...QA299	Numerical analysis
	QA297	Series
	QA298	Numerical simulation. Monte Carlo methods
	QA299.6...QA433	Analysis, real analysis
	QA303...QA316	Calculus
	QA319...QA326	Functional analysis, complex analysis, harmonic analysis, Von Neumann algebras
	QA329	Operator theory
	QA331...QA360	Theory of functions, Hardy spaces, complex function theory, function algebras
	QA370...QA387	Differential equations, partial differential equations, numerical analysis of differential equations
	QA401...QA433	Analytical methods used in the solution of physical problems, Lie groups, wavelets
	QA440...QA699	Geometry
	QA451...QA477	Elementary geometry
	QA481...QA497	Special topics in plane geometry
	QA501...QA529	Descriptive geometry
	QA531...QA538	Trigonometry
	QA551...QA563	Analytic geometry
	QA564...QA581	Algebraic geometry, polynomial automorphisms, Hodge theory
	QA601...QA608	Transformations, correspondences, and general methods for algebraic configurations
	QA611...QA699	Topology, dynamical systems, several complex variables, low dimensional topology
	QA612	Algebraic topology. Combinatorial topology, algebraic K-theory, homology and cohomology of groups
	QA613	Manifolds and cell complexes
	QA614	Global analysis
	QA615...QA640	Infinitesimal geometry
	QA641...QA699	Differential Geometry, symplectic geometry, noncommutative geometry
0	QA801...QA939	Analytic Mechanics; see Engineering