Library News: Apr '25

This month, the library added new subscriptions for the Empire community.  We now have a site license for Bloomberg.com, which includes online access in addition to use of the Bloomberg apps. 

For faculty looking to publish open access in any Cambridge University Press journal, you will now receive free publishing without Article Processing Charges (APCs) as Empire now has an agreement to Cambridge Journals and free open access publishing for any affiliated faculty or staff.

The library has been busy supporting faculty, students, and staff in a variety of ways. We participate in course revisions, program reviews, general education discussions, and help students with assignments and research every day.  

We've also been busy licensing ebooks and helping faculty adopt OER, which has led to significant student savings.  In the Spring 2025 semester, 64% of all Empire State courses were either OER or had free or low-cost textbooks.  The use of ebooks and OER saved Empire students around $1.2 million in textbook costs this past semester. Thanks to the help of the bookstore, faculty, and librarians for working together to help students.

The library has also provided seven Emergency Textbook Grants to students who were not able to afford textbooks for courses. The library will continue to distribute grants until funds are exhausted. We thank the many donors who contributed to the Empire Foundation's crowdfunding grant for these awards. Each award is having an impact on the student's ability to succeed in their classes.

The library and a group of Empire faculty are participating in a national cohort with six higher education institutions led by Ithaka S+R to review approaches to defining and implementing AI literacy.  The other six institutions are Alfred University, Buffalo State University, Chapman University, Montana State University, Santa Clara University, and Virginia Tech. Empire librarians and faculty will work with researchers at Ithaka to conduct interviews and collaboratively ideate new service offerings or programs related to AI literacy.

Thanks to a grant from the SUNY Empire foundation, the library has funds for open access publishing.  To request funds, please see the request form on the Library Toolbox for Faculty and Staff.

Do you have a publication, white paper, conference poster, or other document you'd like archived and searchable via Google Scholar? Are you assigning final projects, theses, capstones, or other major works as part of your courses?  The library has an institutional repository where we can host your work or your students' work. The library will take care of uploading and adding keywords to make the works accessible online. Just email us at librarian@sunyempire.edu and let us know how you'd like us to help.

Did you know that the library can help you license streaming video for use in your courses?  Please message us at librarian@sunyempire.edu to see if we can help. The library also participates in course revisions via the Empire Online process and will help any faculty developers with streaming video as part of course revision support. The library has added the ability to license via SWANK, in addition to Films on Demand, Kanopy, and others. SWANK allows Empire to license current popular films from major studios.

With very mixed feelings we announce that Sarah Morehouse will be leaving Empire for a wonderful opportunity. Sarah has moved our library forward in countless ways in her nearly twenty years with Empire. Here are a few highlights from her service:

• She became the library's expert on copyright and OER and trained librarians, faculty and staff on these complex concepts as well as created OER learning materials and courses for MERLOT across these and other topics.

• She implemented the library's first interlibrary loan agreement with the University at Buffalo.

• She led a massive migration from multiple previous library platforms to the current platform for our website, our reference ticketing system, and our live chat interface.

• She orchestrated our arrangement with the AskUs 24/7 cooperative which provides live chat service to all Empire users whenever our librarians are unavailable.

• She has been heavily involved in representing Empire in the SUNY Librarians Association.

• In 2018, she was awarded the Division of Student Affairs' Creativity and Collaboration Award for Innovation, Imagination and Teamwork

• In 2020, she won the Foundation Award for Excellence in Professional Service.

Sarah's consistent commitment and dedication to the library's mission, the university's mission, and her own continuing profession development and service to the field of librarianship have been inspiring. And her perpetual kindness and professional respect have made her a beloved colleague. If you would like to take a moment to thank Sarah for her efforts on your behalf, please drop her a line at sarah.morehouse@sunyempire.edu.

A reminder that information literacy learning opportunities for students are available for course embed or mentoring as follows (please email librarian@sunyempire.edu to discuss options or for help displaying learning content in a course and creating a specific quiz as a gradebook assignment):

• Library and Research Skills Micro-Course: an all-in-one abbreviated version of the Research Skills Tutorial. It includes practice exercises and a culminating multiple-choice quiz that can be emailed to an instructor. It will replace the existing tutorial by Fall 2025. Covers: topic formation, search tools, search strategies, and scholarly sources + using database results page options. Takes ~1.5 - 3 hours of work to complete in full.
• Library Workshops: a series of 4 distinct pages with video recordings and accompanying content, practice exercises, and quizzes. Covers: topic formation, understanding scholarly and non-scholarly sources, searching, and APA citing. Each workshop takes ~45 minutes to an hour to complete.
• APA Quick Tips Handout and accompanying quiz: a brief one-page review of APA basics and a short multiple-choice quiz.
• APA Micro-course: covers deeper aspects of APA formatting style, including an introduction to narrative in-text citing and paraphrasing. Designed for any student to complete in 3-4 hours with hands-on practice exercises and a short answer quiz that tasks students with constructing citations from scratch.
• MLA Micro-course: similar to APA above but for MLA style.
• Information Literacy Self-Assessment: a 12 question quiz on the basics of plagiarism, citing, and doing research. It’s not intended to be a course-graded assignment, but an introduction to information literacy and the research process for students starting at the university so they can consider areas for self-improvement. Designed for 1^st term students and takes ~ 5-10 minutes to complete.

• Library Scavenger Hunt: 10 open-ended question quiz tasks students with exploring various parts of the library homepage. Designed to familiarize students with the library and its main resources and services. Takes ~15-30 minutes to complete.

As always, one-time individual questions and issues can be answered via the 24/7 live Ask a Librarian chat service in the upper right of the library home page, and more in-depth needs and questions can be tackled by scheduling a 30 minute Teams Consult a Librarian session.

• The Library Advisory Board met in early March to discuss best channels for communication across the university, the library's strategic planning currently in progress, and the best ways to market library resources and services. The university's faculty and staff our our best marketing team! Every time you direct students to us, we help those students become better researchers.
• The Library has hired 3 new adjunct librarians, which brings that total to five. This allows us to expand our Ask a Librarian hours beyond what the full-time librarians can manage and offer both more robust live chat coverage as well as weekend coverage via phone and email.
• The librarians have developed reference services standards to ensure that all user needs are met quickly and efficiently. We have also transitioned from a subject liaison model of reference to a tiered reference model of service, to enable users to be connected quickly with the right librarian with expertise in your area of need.
• Howie the library chatbot has been removed from the live chat widget. Howie had been designed to quickly connect users with the right FAQ or tutorial but, despite numerous adjustments and improvements based on survey feedback, your message was clear: you would prefer to chat with a librarian! We thank you for the vote of confidence.

• The library is working on a homepage redesign to align with the release of the University's new website.  The changes in the new homepage are based on extensive usability testing and feedback from this year.  We will continue to gather input, review data, and make improvements to the website throughout this year.
• Heather Shalhoub presented Proactive Course Improvements with Library Resources Poster Presentation at Annual Meeting.
• IPEDS data collection for library collections holdings and usage was submitted. IPEDS is a system of 12 interrelated survey components conducted annually that gathers data from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs. The data collections occur in fall, winter, and spring.
• LibKey activation and implementation has been established in EBSCOhost databases. LibKey is a suite of scholarly access tools from Third Iron designed to help libraries and researchers access full-text articles and ebooks.
• We are developing LibGuides best practices and consistency improvements across the guides platform. LibGuides is the platform housing the vast majority of library webpages, subject guides and course guides.
• The library is also working in the IT ticketing system to collaborate with Empire Online to repair broken links in courses without requiring faculty to submit additional tickets in multiple systems.