Dartmouth College Library
Collection Management & Development Program
Collection Development Policy
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
- COLLECTION AREA
- HISTORY
- GENERAL PURPOSE
- DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PROGRAM
- GENERAL SUBJECT BOUNDARIES
- LANGUAGES
- GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
- TYPES OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
- FORMAT OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
- SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS
- OTHER RESOURCES AVAILABLE
- OTHER RELATED COLLECTION POLICIES
- CREATION DATE
- REVISION DATE
- LC CLASS
- BIBLIOGRAPHER
- LIST OF URLs
- COLLECTING INTENSITY CHART is not currently available online.
Environmental Studies
The Environmental Studies Program began in 1970, the year of the first Earth
Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was one of the
first such programs in the country. Dartmouth College had a long history of
interest in environmental issues, fueled partly through the activities of the
Dartmouth Outing Club. The program was founded "to create an institutional
base where different viewpoints and kinds of knowledge about the environment
could be brought together," (Environmental Studies at Dartmouth, Environmental
Studies Program., n.d.) and "to provide an opportunity for undergraduates to
assess the seriousness and complexity of the environmental problems and to
understand how to search for solutions to these problems." (Organization,
Regulations, and Courses, September, 1987, p. 307)
A hallmark of the program, the Environmental Studies 50 course in which groups
of students work on local area environmental and land use planning problems,
was begun in 1973. The ENVS 50 project reports are in the Environmental
Studies Program Library, a small reading room in the department. The program
sponsors a field study program to Africa.
Originally, undergraduates could either receive a certificate for completing
the Program's course of study, or modify a major with Environmental Studies.
The class of 2000 is the last one able to earn the certificate. An
interdisciplinary graduate program, Earth, Ecosystem, and Ecological Sciences Program (EEES), was established in 1993. The doctoral degree from the
EEES Program is granted by either the Biology or Earth Sciences departments.
Starting in 1994, undergraduate have the option to major in Environmental
Studies, or minor in either Environmental Studies or Environmental Sciences,
and there is an Honors Program for undergraduates.
When the Program began, most faculty had their primary appointments in other
departments. Currently, the department has eight full-time faculty, with a
pending faculty hire in the area of ecosystem modeling, and 10 adjunct
professors. The interests of the full-time faculty range from English
literature to Economics to Biogeochemistry. The number of courses offered
during a typical term have doubled in the last ten years.
Laboratory facilities have grown considerably in the last few years.
Laboratories currently include the Environmental Measurements Laboratory (EML),
an analytical chemistry lab shared with Earth Sciences, a Soil Sciences
teaching lab, a GIS lab for ecosystem modeling, and a Remote Sensing facility
which is shared with Earth Sciences. Future plans include a shared GIS
research laboratory for all the science departments in the Fairchild Center,
and Environmental Studies is projected to be a major user of this facility.
The Environmental Studies Program gained a "Friends Group" in 1990, with the
establishment of the Dartmouth Environmental Network (DEN). The organization
funds programs and awards, and sponsors an Environmental Issues Symposium
annually.
Several institutes are associated closely with the Environmental Studies Program:
the Dickey Center Institute for Arctic Studies, the Institute on International Environmental Governance, and the Jemison Institute for Advancing Technology in Developing Countries, founded in 1995. At the initiative of an Environmental Studies 50 class, the Dartmouth Organic Farm was begun in 1996, and is actively used in coursework and research.
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Environmental Studies, the study of the environment and of related issues, requires an interdisciplinary approach. The research that is applied to understanding the environment is based in disciplines ranging from chemistry, earth sciences, biology, and engineering, to geography, government, and anthropology. All these and others are necessary for the scientific, political and social analysis of environmental issues.
The collection includes materials in all of the Dartmouth College libraries
that are focused on environmental sciences and studies, and also those that
treat the environmental aspects of many other subjects. Specifically, the
collection supports the curriculum and research needs of the Environmental Studies Program, which includes scientific, technological, literary, political, social, and economic aspects of environmental issues. The collection also supports the teaching and research of the Chemistry, Earth Sciences and Geography Departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Thayer School of Engineering and the Dartmouth Medical School, as these departments and schools work in areas relating to environmental issues.
The collection will continue to reflect curriculum developments in the
Environmental Studies Program and ongoing research in the environmental sciences. Materials relating to the environment within other subject areas will also continue to be collected independent of specific curriculum or research needs which have been previously mentioned.
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The Environmental Studies Department at Dartmouth College offers a major in Environmental Studies, or a minor in either Environmental Studies or Environmental Sciences. There is also an Honors Program for undergraduates. An interdisciplinary graduate program, the Earth, Ecosystem, and Ecological Sciences Program (EEES), offers graduate students an opportunity to work on environmental research projects while earning a doctoral degree in either Biology or Earth Sciences.
The mission of the Environmental Studies Program is "to provide an opportunity for undergraduates to understand and assess the complexity of environmental problems and to learn how to search for solutions to these problems." (ORC, 1998, p.424)
Some of the Environmental Studies faculty are involved in teaching and research in other fields that have environmental concerns such as law or engineering, or that are related to the natural environment, such as biology, chemistry, earth sciences, and hydrology.
The program necessarily draws upon courses and faculty in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences such as journalism, literature, law, Afro-American Studies, biology, chemistry, geology and hydrology. Many courses are team taught.
In addition to supporting the undergraduate, liberal arts education at Dartmouth College, the Program also provides policy assistance to decision makers at all levels, from the College to the local community to the Federal Government. The Program also tries to stimulate interdisciplinary research on environmental problems in the College and the Professional schools.
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Environmental studies involves a wide range of subjects, and indeed emphasizes the synthesis of many subject areas in order to bring a global perspective to environmental problems. Therefore, most of the libraries at Dartmouth collect some material that is relevant, and several
libraries have materials in the same subject areas. For example: geography, government, anthropology and African studies materials are in Baker; conservation biology, ecology, toxicology, botany, forestry, wildlife management, and agriculture are in Dana; environmental engineering, waste disposal, green business, and environmental impact analysis are in Feldberg; atmospheric science, soil science, water resources, and acid rain are in Kresge. However, materials relating to acid rain, agriculture, soils, water and air quality, pesticides, influence of man on nature and others may be found in all four libraries. Popular reading on the environment is generally in Baker but may be found in Kresge or Dana as well. Collection development policies in biology, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering, climatology, and government documents all indicate that there are environmental aspects to those collections.
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Although no language is excluded, English is the primary language of the materials collected for Environmental Studies.
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While North America is the primary geographic area covered by the collection, no area is specifically excluded. Additional materials relating to Canada are collected through the Canadian document depository program. Reflecting the current interest of the program, materials concerning Africa are being collected heavily.
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Monographs, serials, indexes and abstracts, statistical and other standard reference works are routinely
collected. Conference proceedings and dissertations are purchased selectively. Current awareness type
material, often in the form of newsletters, is not generally collected. An exception is the Environment Reporter which provides updated information concerning United States federal and state governmental actions related to pollution control. The Map Room at Baker has a large collection of international maps. The Library also subscribes to a variety of collections in microfiche; notable among these is Envirofiche, a comprehensive collection of both popular and technical literature published by the Environmental Information Corporation (EIC). Electronic data in the form of CD-ROMs and floppy disks are also collected. Subscriptions to online databases, such as the Arctic Environmental Bibliography(?) and Enviroline enhance the collection. Another example, The World News Connection online database available at Baker includes English and translated environmental information from non-United States media sources. Enviroline is another important database.
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No format is excluded.
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Information relating to the environment is also found in the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration and the White Mountains collection, both of which are maintained by the Dartmouth Library's Special Collections. Government publications, which include both general and technical information, are received regularly from the State of New Hampshire, the United States government, the Canadian government and a variety of international organizations, such as the United Nations Environment Programme. Noteworthy are the reports of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, environmental impact statements from most executive departments, and studies prepared by the committees of the U.S. Congress. These collections are discussed in separate collection development policy statements.
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The library at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory is accessible to Dartmouth College researchers. The Environmental Studies Program maintains a library of newsletters, textbooks, special bibliographies, popular books, and both technical and popular level journals. The collection is available to Dartmouth users, but as it is housed in the Program's offices, it is only available when those offices are open. A database of materials availablecan be searched through DCIS at the Environmental Studies Program Library. The collection of the Vermont Law School Library is an important supplementary resource for legal materials relating to environmental studies. Resources of Research Libraries Group and government depository libraries are also available.
Access to national libraries, such as the National Agricultural Library and the EPA Library, are also available.
biology
chemistry
earth sciences
engineering
climatology
government documents
January 1989, (Jon Brown, Barbara DeFelice, Robert Jaccaud, Pam Ploeger)
September 1992, (Jon Brown, Barbara DeFelice, Robert Jaccaud, Connie Rinaldo)
March 1999, (John Cocklin, Barbara DeFelice, Janifer Holt, Connie Rinaldo)
Environmental Studies materials may fall into the following class numbers; however, none of these are solely for Environmental Studies materials. Other class numbers may also be relevant.
BJ, G, GB, GC, GF, HC, NA, PN, PS, PT, Q, QC, QD, QE, QH, QK, QL, RA1190-RA1270, S, SB,SD SH, SK, TD,TK,TP
John Cocklin,
Barbara DeFelice,
Janifer Holt,
Peggy Sleeth (1999)
All bibliographers who purchase materials within the scope of the Environmental Studies Collection Development Policy, regardless of whether the material falls into one of the above class numbers, are responsible for coding orders c3=e.
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- Environmental Protection Agency
(http://www.epa.gov/)
- United States Geological Survey
(http://www.usgs.gov/)
- National Climatic Data Center
(http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/)
- Center for International Earth Science Information Network
(http://www.ciesin.org/)
- Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
(http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/)
- New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services
(http://www.state.nh.us/des/descover.htm)
- Vermont Agency of Natural Resources
(http://www.anr.state.vt.us/)
- Environmental Reference Desk (CSA)
(http://www.csa.com/htbin/disphtml.cgi?un=none&ac=none&fn=environmental_reference.html)
- Environmental Education Link
http://eelink.net/sitemap.html)
- CRREL (Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab)
(http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/)
- IGC (Institute for Global Communication): Progressive Networking and Future Collaboration
(http://www.igc.org/igc/)
- Endangered Species
[http://www.fws.gov/r9endspp/endspp.html/]
- National Biological Service
[http://www.nbs.gov/]
- The World Conservation Monitoring Centre
[http://www.wcmc.org.uk/]
- World Agricultural Information Center
[http://www.fao.org/waicent/agricul.htm)
- World Health Organization
[http://www.who.org/]
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Last updated May 10, 1999 by: (z)