Tag Archives: National Information Literacy Awareness Month

Information Literacy Dice Pass Phrase

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

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Passwords are the bane of modern existence. Trying to remember them and keep other people from being able to easily guess them causes many headaches. Don’t get discouraged and resort to the worst passwords or other easily guessable things. Don’t use the same password for everything since hackers at one site will try it on the others.

One good trick is to use a phrase or sentence you will remember and then just using the first letter or number of each word in the phrase. So if your phrase was the last sentence the password would be 1Gti2uaposywr. However, if you are really security conscious you can go even further. You can go beyond a password with a passphrase.

A Passphrase Past a Password

A passphrase is a series of words instead of one. This series should be made of random words that you can create a mnemonic to help you remember.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends rolling dice and using them to help determine words from their word list using a random number. If you’d like to try it find the full explanation and word lists.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

November is Information Literacy Month 2019

01 Friday Nov 2019

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Information literacy means making sure people can find, evaluate for quality and use the information that they need. This can be for school related subjects, like picking good resources for a research paper or speech, or it can be for everyday life, like picking out the best loan or credit card for you.

Library Services is the heart of information literacy here at Kirkwood Community College. We not only help students, faculty, and staff with individual questions, but we offer instruction to classes through face to face classes, videos, and databases, Brain Fuse that is directed more to the individual and Credo Instruct that can be accessed both by individual students and dropped in Talon as objects that can then connect with class gradebooks.

Kirkwood Library Services has done several things over the years to celebrate and promote this event. This year we’re adding to our series of blog posts. Watch for them all month to learn more about information literacy. Check out previous information literacy posts on this roundup.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Roundup

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

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November is here and that ends National Information Literacy Awareness Month, but information literacy and tech literacy are things to work on for everyone all year. Please revisit our posts.

What is Information Literacy?

Things to Think and Know About

Keep calm, think it through and we’ll be back with more helpful tips next year!

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Bad Historic Twitter Feeds

02 Friday Nov 2018

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Twitter is a fun and interesting place to find a conversation. You can find the Kirkwood library there at @KirkwoodSmart. (There are also trolls although I’ve had people say worse things to me on Facebook.) But Twitter does have its problems. One of these are the historic photo tweet feeds.

Some of these chronic offenders just take images that don’t belong to them and post them without verification, without credit, and without context. They can be used to spread mis-information and at the very least take attention and money away from the owners of the images and interesting information away from YOU!

When exactly is an image from? What was really going on there? Why was it taken and most importantly, did Theodore Roosevelt ever really ride a moose? (You may be cool, but you’ll NEVER be Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose across a river cool. — OK that line which I love is actually from an uncredited meme, but it’s true!)

A doctored image of then Presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose

Doctored Image from Sept. 9, 1912 New York Tribune, See linked article

The Problem with Feeds

Historian Alexis Cole explains in her article what’s bad about these feeds and how they could be made much better. So what can we do about them?

Feeds to Unfollow

Even if you love finding interesting feeds of photos stop helping these feeds. If enough people unfollow they’ll go away leaving more room for legitimate sites. So go to your Twitter account right now and unfollow:

@HistoryinPics, @HistoricalPics, @HistoryInPix, @historylvrsclub

There are others but those are some of the biggest offenders.

Feeds to Take Their Place

But if you like old, cool stuff online never fear we have your back. Cole recommends following these accounts instead (and yes the University of Iowa suggestion was hers, I just moved it to the top).

@UISpecColl

News from the University of Iowa Special Collections libraries. Also on Tumblr  & YouTube 

@PublicDomainRev

Online journal and cabinet of curiosities dedicated to showcasing the most beautiful and unusual out-of-copyright works available on the web.

@BeineckeLibrary 

“An inspiration to all who enter.” Visit in person or online to engage the past in the present for the future.

@SchomburgCenter

Where Every Month is Black History Month.

@UKParlArchives

We hold & provide access to the records of UK Parliament and other political and parliamentary collections. Use our tweets to discover more.

@HarvardArchives

People. Discoveries. Change. History. The Harvard University Archives.

@ShapellManu

Explore history in its original form through letters and manuscripts of Lincoln, Einstein, Mark Twain, American Presidents and more.

@medievalpoc

People of Color in European Art History: Because you wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate.

@librarycongress

World’s largest library. Explore collections, services & plan a visit. Follow  to meet Carla Hayden, 14th Librarian of Congress.

@schubertiadellc

Dealers in autographs, manuscripts, books, artworks and collectibles in the performing and visual arts. Follow for beautiful books & photos every day.

Other Cool Old Stuff Feeds

I personally would also suggest:

@IUPUI_SpecColl

@ref_archivist (this is only one of several great the Henry Ford Benson Library accounts – find and follow them all!)

P.S.

And sadly no, as far as we know Teddy never did ride a moose and that definitely isn’t a real image. But kudos to the newspaper team behind the September 8, 1912 New York Tribune for putting that out into the world. Heather Cole, curator of Harvard’s Theodore Roosevelt collection, tells you the real story.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

 

Information Literacy Tracking Down a Study

26 Friday Oct 2018

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Here at the Kirkwood library, and at most academic or school libraries, we deal a lot with citations. Most of the time we are concerned with citing to avoid plagiarism, but there is a second reason to have citations and that is to make sure the information is good.

Double Checking Citations

Sometimes even if there is a citation people might just make them up, they might be taking things out of context, or they might exaggerate a point. Personally I once was very excited to see that a Rose Wilder Lane book was the first to use the term Young Adult in its advertising. So I looked up the citation in the book that mentioned it, that referred me to another book, that referred me to another book, that referred me to another book. By the time I reached the end of the trail the book was now described as one of the first of a new classification of books known as Young Adult. The statement asserting its status got weaker every book I went back.

Especially be careful of things being passed around online. People grab things that are “interesting” to share without checking anything else and a list without citations or sources might float around the web or even end up in print full of errors without anyone noticing. This especially happens when people think they make a point they already agree with. For some tame examples, teachers had to live under terrible rules in the 19th century or that there are bigger discipline problems in classrooms today than in the 1940s.

Pulling a Fast One

Recently I found an article from the Fast Company that talked about a very prevalent study. One so well known that it’s passed into everyday thought and is just assumed to be true. The story is that a study of a Yale class from 1953 showed that those who had set goals had made more money that all the rest of the class combined. It’s a great story and self-improvement speakers have been using it since at least before 1991. However, it is NOT true. There was NO such study.

Upside and Downside of Goals

As the Fast Company article says goal setting seems to be a human trait and there are definite benefits of goal setting in keeping organized and on track. However, goal setting can create a myopic focus where the goal itself becomes the focus instead of what the goal is supposed to lead to. For instance, if the purpose of a Facebook page is to bring people into your business and you focus too much on getting a certain number of likes rather than getting people through the door. It can narrow options and send resources chasing something that might not be in your best interest.

So while it never hurts to have a plan, don’t become so focused on it that you lose other opportunities that might be even better. Think about WHY you’re doing something. Don’t believe that the only thing you need to do is make goals to have a successful life.

Things On the Internet and in Print Aren’t Always True

While it seldom would happen with an unpublished paper you write for school, having clear citations can help people who read it and want to learn more on a topic or who want to know how you know that. It also doesn’t hurt to question even the published articles and books you read and to check back the citations on things that seem new and startling or even something you’ve seen everywhere around the web. Just putting something in print, online or on paper, doesn’t make it true, but having and checking citations can help you tell the real from the fake.

Librarians for the Win

The reference staff at the Yale University Library was able to prove both through citation analysis and in-depth research that no such study ever took place at Yale in 1953 or any other year.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Private Browsing

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

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If you are not yet taking advantage of the private browsing feature on your website, you ought to be!

Browsers

First a word about a web browser is the interface you use to access websites. Popular browsers include Chrome, Firefox (Mozilla), Edge (Microsoft), Safari (Apple), and Opera. Most computers come with a single browser. If you are still only running that one browser download another one right now! If you are having trouble on the internet the first thing to do is to try another browser and often that will fix the issue.

Private Browsing

One step you can take for a more secure web browsing experience is to use the private setting on your browser. Even though private browser settings are called different things through different platforms all major browsers will have a private browsing option.

When you have private browsing engaged certain functions are blocked or not recorded. According to TechAdvisory.Org: “Your web browser — whether it be Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, or Opera — remembers the URLs of the sites you visit, cookies that track your activity, passwords you’ve used, and temporary files you’ve downloaded.” Using the private settings can hide passwords, autofills, and telling advertisers your history and patterns. While your behavior still can be tracked by more sophisticated tactics, this simple step will make it harder for you to be tracked or for your information to easily fall into the wrong hands. It’s especially a good idea to use them when you are on a public computer, particularly if you’re using passwords.

Bonus Benefit – Multiple Accounts At Once

While you can also do this by having multiple browsers open at once, private browsing settings let’s you log into the same website with 2 different accounts at once.

The Specifics

Check out these two in depth articles.

Forbes lays out what each browser’s private browsing is called and what specifically each one does and doesn’t do.

How to Geek gives specific directions on how to use the private browsing setting in the most popular browsers with details on using it on multiple platforms and devices.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

National Information Literacy Awareness Month

22 Monday Oct 2018

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October is National Information Literacy Awareness Month. Although not publicized nearly as much as it was when it was first declared in 2009, each October libraries shine a spotlight on Information Literacy.

Information Literacy

According to the American Library Association information literacy is: “Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. Information literacy also is increasingly important in the contemporary environment of rapid technological change and proliferating information resources.”

In other words information literacy is the ability to realize when you need information and then find it, evaluate it, and use it to answer your question or complete your project.

Kirkwood Stands Out

Although library services try to teach information literacy all year, we take a special focus during October. Here are highlights of our previous Information Literacy Posts.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in October, so we didn’t dedicate the entire month to Information Literacy posts here on the blog, but we’re going to send out several this week. Enjoy!

What is Information Literacy?

Things to Think and Know About

Keep calm, think it through and we’ll be back with more helpful tips this year!

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Awareness Month 2017

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

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Each October our thoughts turn to National Information Literacy Awareness Month. Information Literacy, making sure people can find, evaluate for quality and use the information that they need, is a big part of any library program. It’s no longer enough to be literate, as in being able to read, but you must be literate in figuring out where you can get the information you need and separating the wheat from the chaff to make sure what you’ve found is good.

Read a brief history and the purpose of National Information Literacy Awareness Month.

Find previous posts and Iowa’s proclamation on National Information Literacy Awareness Month here:
https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/information-literacy-awareness-month-comes-to-iowa/

Watch for a series of blog posts that will come out this month giving you a leg up with information literacy.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Post Roundup 2015

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

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We’ve wrapped up another National Information Literacy Awareness Month, but let’s take a minute and look back on our previous posts. It’s never too late to think about information literacy. NILAM

What is Information Literacy?

Things to Think and Know About

Keep calm, think it through and we’ll be back with more helpful tips next year!

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Do You Know About Lost Flashdrives?

29 Thursday Oct 2015

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By far the most common thing in our lost and found is lost flashdrives. It’s all too easy to be printing something out and then be so concentrated on the paper copy that you forget to grab your flashdrive and in some cases even to log off of the computer. We get roughly half a dozen flashdrives/memory sticks/thumb drives every day. Ninety percent of them are either Kirkwood designed or, more commonly, black. Flashdrives

We urge you to take a minute right now and create a word document called This Belongs To, put in your contact information, and save it to your flashdrive. In order to speed its return if someone finds it. Adding something unique like a wrist band also speeds identification.

If a flashdrive is turned into the library we turn it over to the library lost and found located at the Circulation Desk. Students return to the library asking for these more than any other lost item so we hold them here a week. After that we turn them over to the main campus lost and found located at 230 Iowa Hall, phone number 398-5578 (they answer as student life, just ask for lost and found).

Links to Some of The Books Recently Added to the Collection:

Our Special Display This Month

From last month Banned Books Month

Check out Halloween themed books until the end of the month.

Event – Exam Cram

Save the day for special events in the library to help you relax and blow off steam before Finals Week begins. Hold December 1st to come visit us at the Cedar Rapids campus.

EVENT – National Information Literacy Awareness Month

This month we urge people to stop and think about how they receive, use, evaluate, and apply information. Learn more from the national organization.

Event – Misc.

The Library also celebrated Back to the Future Day (the day when, according to the movies, Marty McFly came to the future).

Research Tips

Do you know you can check out books from the University of Iowa?

And remember you contact us at the library any time by phone, e-mail, chat, or stop on by! We’re always glad to see you!