Science, engineering, medicine, law and agriculture etc. are located in the appropriate campus libraries. This ensures that publications of academies, observatories, libraries, museums, and art galleries are located in the appropriate subject collections. Where subject interests overlap, e.g. environmental issues, regular consultation between librarians seeks to minimise inadvertent duplication of holdings. The government documents collection is multi-disciplinary and supports a very wide variety of research and teaching programmes. It is primarily used by students and faculty from the Arts, Law, Management and Education faculties.
Collection development is the responsibility of the government documents bibliographer.
Regular contact with other subject and area bibliographers and teaching departments is maintained through the sharing of information concerning the availability of publications. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library is the major location for the University's government documents collection. In addition, the following McGill libraries collect government publications corollary to their subject responsibilities. Howard Ross Library of Management is a selective depository for Statistics Canada publications and orders business related documents of the Canadian federal and provincial governments, and foreign governments, especially the United States. It also selects course and research related material from international organizations in subjects such as international finance, banking, monetary policy and, to a lesser extent, tourism and leisure.