SUNY ESF
Faculty Services
Your Ready Partners
The Faculty and Staff of the F. Franklin Moon Library are here to support your teaching and research and partner with you at all stages of the research, scholarship, and teaching cycles.
Welcome! The librarians at Moon Library are able to help with locating articles and information, using databases, finding books, helping your students with research, citation analysis, and much more.
Each librarian is assigned one or more departments as a liaison and focuses on certain areas within the library. We are available for research help at the main desk in the library from 9 am-3 pm and by appointment during the academic year. Please let us know how we can assist you in making your research and teaching more effective.
Library Instruction
Librarians are available to give guest lectures on research strategies and library sources. We are eager help you achieve your learning outcomes for your students. Librarians also teach a one-credit information literacy course (ESF 200) each semester, in person and online.
Contact a librarian to visit your class or work with you on developing content for your course. We appreciate meeting with you before the class to develop our lesson plan and tailor our visit to best meet your students' needs. Examples of topics we have covered include:
- Using library resources such as the catalog and databases to complete specific papers and projects
- Citing sources, including how to use a citation manager
- Evaluating sources
- Introduction of specific databases and resources that are relevant to a course, department, or subject area
- Custom assignments for courses to help students achieve information literacy outcomes specific to your course or curriculum (i.e. FCH 232).
Specialized Instruction to Enhance Student Research
Faculty report students, and students self-report, as having difficulty getting started with research assignments and defining topics. The focus essay assignment, coupled with the research log, is intended to assist students to develop appropriate questions that can be investigated through engagements with scholarly literature. This assignment can be used as a first step in a sequenced set of assignments culminating in an academic paper or another kind of project, or as a stand-alone exercise.
Emphasis is placed on exploring the scholarly conversation around a topic and developing the appropriate pool of research on a topic. Rather than connecting "pearls on a string" students will:
- Identify core research on a topic
- Identify the research that disagrees with their thesis or research topic
- Explore the broader pool of research that informed both positions
- Conduct the preliminary research for a paper and write down (log) the steps taken to decide on their thesis or research question.
The focus essay will demonstrate the search terms that were used, the databases searched, the types of resources found, how the student modified their search, an evaluation of their results, and how the student's topic may have changed as a result. Students will be exposed to how to read a scholarly article in the course of this exercise.
ESF 200 Information Literacy
ESF 200: Information Literacy is required for many majors. This one-credit course is offered during the first five weeks of the Fall and Spring semesters. Online sections are also available, including during the summer. This course helps students gain confidence in looking for various types of information, understand information seeking processes, critically analyze sources of information, and feel comfortable seeking guidance from experts such as librarians, researchers, and professionals. Some topics covered include: selecting and developing a topic, library catalog and database searching, citation management, scholarly communication, publication cycles, and evaluating sources.
This course meets college learning outcomes in the following ways:
- Basic communication skills: Students will see themselves as contributors to scholarship, rather than only consumers of it.
- Technological and Information Literacy
- Use a variety of research methods to suit particular needs, circumstances, and types of inquiry
- Use research tools and indicators of authority to determine the credibility of sources
- Match information needs and search strategies to appropriate search tools
- Understand and be able to utilize the resources available through F. Franklin Moon Library
- Give credit to the original ideas of others through proper attribution and citation
- Understand the purpose of copyright, fair use, open access, and the public domain
- Critical Thinking
- Complete multifaceted research by breaking down complex questions into simpler ones, narrowing the scope of inquiry
- Critically evaluate contributions made by others in connected information environments
- Understand the increasingly social nature of the information ecosystem where authorities actively connect with one another and sources develop over time
Using Scantron and Ordering Forms
Ordering Forms
Your department can order forms for you. They should:
- Fill out the Scantron Order Form. Be sure to provide a State account number for an ESF recharge. The price is currently $0.20 per form.
- Email or drop off the form to Donna Follett at Moon Library (dbfollet@esf.edu) and she will contact you or your department to arrange delivery or pick up of your order
Can I use forms from SU?
Unfortunately, you cannot use any forms from Syracuse University that you may have on hand. Our Scantron machine is configured only to read the green ESF forms.
What should my students fill out on the form before the exam?
The students have three fill-able fields: Name, Username, Version.
- Name is the student's full name. It will appear in raw scan data only.
- The Username field is mandatory if you wish to generate readable grade reports from the raw scan data. Ideally this should be the student's 8-letter NetID, which is unique to each student. (This will correspond to the first part of their e-mail address, before the "@" sign.) The username field is the only field that displays in the grade reports, so it is important to include.
- If you have multiple versions of the same test, the version field needs to be filled out (using all four digits - ie, version 0001, 0002, etc). (If you have only one test version, your students should leave this field blank, as stray marks in this field may interfere with proper scanning.)
What should students use to fill out the form?
The form must be filled out with a No. 2 pencil. Pens should not be used with the green ESF-branded form.
What if I have a student who will be using SU's Office of Disability Services?
Experts@ESF
Experts@ESF brings together all types of scholarship, expertise and activities by the scholars
of ESF to share our rich story of discovery over our century-plus of study of the
forest and environment. Consistent with our commitment to Open Access, this repository
hosts a wide variety of research, including publications and data, as well as material
from the College Archives and theses and dissertations.
The Esploro platform that powers Experts@ESF makes it easy to showcase faculty work and find subject matter experts to help secure
more funding, enhance collaborations, attract talented researchers, and boost your
institution’s reputation. The wealth of information in Experts@ESF is available for
other systems as well, facilitating activity reporting, tenure processes, and national
assessment projects, while minimizing the time spent on manual data entry.
Researcher profiles showcase the full depth and breadth of faculty expertise, facilitating
collaborations, attracting funders and enhancing the institution’s academic reputation.
Smart Harvesting AI is at the heart of how Esploro keeps research repositories and
researcher profiles comprehensive, accurate and always up to date. It automatically
captures research output and data, improving an institution’s ability to showcase
its research, enrich its reporting, and relieve the administrative burden.
What is Dryad?
Dryad is an open access research data repository that is available to ESF researchers, students, and faculty. Dryad is committed to the open availability of research data based on the FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
Why Use Dryad?
- It's currently free. The SUNY Office of Library and Information Science (OLIS) has negotiated a consortia membership that runs through the end of 2024.
- It is designed to comply with funder mandates and data management policies that require data to be made freely and permanently available. Data deposits will receive a persistent digital object identifier (DOI), a Creative Commons (CCO) license, and long-term archiving.
- Data deposits will be reviewed for quality control by Dryad data curators. This provides confidence that the data will meet standards needed for discovery, sharing, and reuse.
- The submission process is made easy by utilizing a researcher's ORCID iD (required) to authenticate and link to ESF as an institution. From there, the submission system will guide you step-by-step through the process of describing and uploading your data.
- Dryad accepts deposits from all academic disciplines and supports multiple file formats. Dryad partners with Zenodo to offer a wider range of licensing options for proprietary software.
- Dryad keeps track of views, downloads, and citations of your data, allowing researchers to measure the impact of their deposits.
Getting Started
First time users will need to login with their ORCID iD from an ESF network IP address (on campus is ideal or please use the virtual desktop at vss.esf.edu to mimic the campus network IP). Users will select SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry from the institution list during the first login. Dryad will remember your insitutional affiliation and you will see the ESF logo on the Dryad home page. If you don't have an ORCID iD, you can create one by clicking the same login link.
You can find more resources on research data management here.
