Library News: About the Library

The library at SUNY Empire is unique in many ways, and that allows us to partner with different departments and individuals to best serve students, faculty, and staff.

If you have an idea for partnering with the library on something, please reach out; it would be great to hear from you! You can email me at shannon.pritting@sunyempire.edu.

The library coordinates OER and affordability efforts and scholarly communications support. We provide consultative, instructional, and outreach services to promote faculty, student, and staff engagement with open educational resources and open pedagogy. We partner with university stakeholders to advance course material affordability initiatives including OER and low or no-cost textbook alternatives. We provide scholarly publishing support, including assisting faculty with OER publication opportunities and other scholarly publishing needs, such as repository and research support.

These areas are coordinated by Jennifer Collins. If you would like to discuss opportunities, please email Jennifer Collins at jennifer.collins@sunyempire.edu or book time with Jennifer via Microsoft Teams.

The library collaborates with Empire Online instructional designers, faculty developers, and other staff as needed to develop and revise courses. In this process, the library has input on options to improve textbook affordability, library support of assignments and discussions, integrating information literacy where appropriate, licensing external content, and selecting and linking to library content. 

We also take part in emergency accessibility and copyright reviews.

Faculty can consult with the library on an ad hoc basis for small revisions to live courses, such as replacing broken links or improving assignments by supplementing the instructions with library tutorials. 

These areas are coordinated by Sarah Morehouse. Please book time with Sarah or email her at sarah.morehouse@sunyempire.edu if you would like to consult about any kind of library supports for your course or courses.

The library works to foster an engaged community and to support University-wide student learning goals pertaining to information literacy and related issues and policies. This includes library-specific projects and collaborations with relevant groups in the University community.

These areas are coordinated by Dana Longley. Please book time with Dana or send an email to dana.longley@sunyempire.edu to discuss an opportunity, or if you have questions about library instruction and information literacy resources or services.

The library collaborates with other student-facing teams across the university, such as Academic Support, Student Success, and Opportunity Programs to develop and coordinate learning resources and opportunities for students.

Reference services involve teaching students, faculty, and staff how to understand, find, and use library resources in order to meet their research needs. We do this via live chat, email, phone, the library chatbot, and our FAQs 365/24/7 through an arrangement with the AskUs 24/7 consortium of academic librarians, who answer our users questions when we are unavailable and vice versa.

Library outreach is intended to keep our university community aware of new library resources and services via a variety of engagement strategies such as attendance at university events, orientation sessions, social media communications, and this newsletter. If you are hosting a university event and would a librarian to staff a table or to present, please email us at librarian@sunyempire.edu.

These areas are coordinated by Sara Hull. Please book time with Sara or drop her a line at sara.hull@sunyempire.edu if you would like to discuss a possible collaboration, or if you have questions about reference services or library outreach opportunities.

The library partners with SUNY Empire's IT department, Empire Online, and SUNY Library Support to offer access to thousands of online resources and keep them working smoothly.

Web services involves managing the library's website (T4 platform) and our Springshare platform which hosts the library's many guides curated by our librarians. This involves maintenance, fixing issues like broken links, removing and updating obsolete content.

User experience (UX) is about the experience our students, faculty, and staff have while interacting with the library's website, resources, and services. This involves improving the organization, presentation, and navigation to make it work best for our university community using the principles of user experience, content strategy, information architecture, and universal design.

Systems involves the management of the library management system (Alma) as well as the administration for each library database and product to make sure they continue to work properly, to customize them for our needs, and to maintain library resource access for everyone across our university.

These areas are coordinated by Heather Shalhoub. Please book a time with Heather or send her an email at heather.shalhoub@sunyempire.edu if you would like to discuss possible projects or questions about these services.