Information Literacy Awareness Month 2017

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Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, National Information Literacy Month

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.

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Information Literacy Post Roundup 2015

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Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month

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.

What is Information Literacy?

• Introduction to the Month
• What is Information Literacy?
• Iowa Official Proclamation of National Information Literacy Awareness Month
• President of United States proclaims NILAM
• New Books Related to Information Literacy

Things to Think and Know About

• Asking Good Questions
• Copyright
• Have a Plan for an Online Afterlife
• Online Activities and Job Hunting
• Passwords
• Privacy
• Social Media

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?

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Flashdrives, Information Literacy, Lost and Found, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Newsletter

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.

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:

• Picture Books on Emotional Subjects
• Children’s Books
• Information Literacy

Our Special Display This Month

From last month Banned Books Month

• Banned Books Week – What Is Happening This Year
• Banned Books – The Bible?
• Updated Banned Books Lists 2015

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.

• Introduction to the Month
• New Books Related to Information Literacy
• Privacy
• Asking Good Questions
• Online Activities and Job Hunting

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!

Information Literacy: Online Privacy and Job Hunting

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Information Literacy, Job Hunting, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Online Privacy, privacy

Here’s a little secret about the Internet, what you do online everybody can see.  That doesn’t sound like a secret, but you’d be surprised how many people act like it is. That everybody isn’t limited to your friends or  to your social group, it includes future potential employers, loan officers, etc.  It’s important to be aware of that when you’re posting online. Go through this presentation from SlideShare for a lot of good advice at your own pace. Highlights include have separate accounts for work and play and periodically check to see what you’ve put online because you might not remember and what other people have put online about you. Have you searched for yourself lately?

Jobhunting and the Absence of Online Privacy from Jim Stroud

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 Importance of Good Questions

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A More Beautiful Question, Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Right Question, Walter Berger

Research shows that innovations and breakthroughs are often triggered by somebody asking the right question. Journalist Walter Berger puts it “you find at the root of it all is a great question; a beautiful question of someone asking why isn’t someone doing this or what if someone tried to do that?”

To ask the right question, the great question, the beautiful question you need to ask a lot of them. This is a problem because while little kids start out asking a ton of questions, school and society are set up to discourage question asking. K-12 schools especially tend to focus on the importance of memorizing answers rather than creating your own questions.

So start asking more questions. It will not only be good for you as you learn more, it will also be good for society. So ask questions whether in school, on the job or in life.

Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, is available here at Kirkwood Community College Library Services at call number 658.4 B496m at the Cedar Rapids campus.

Berger also recommends checking out the

Right Question Institute:
http://rightquestion.org/

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: Privacy

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ACLU, Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, privacy

Today many people accept surveillance without a thought. They tell everyone where they are with GPS on their phones. They click all sorts of acceptances that mean companies can access your information for contacts, profiles, actions and interests and the same for as many of your friends that it can reach through your connection. They store things on Google Drive which Google mines for information and so on. Most of the time people don’t even think about it, but during Information Literacy Month, let’s take a moment to do exactly that.

The American Civil Liberties Union has produced a booklet detailing the chilling effect that this surveillance can have. So take a look and think about what give away about yourself and your actions even if you “have nothing to hide.”

https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/something-hide-writers-and-artists-against-surveillance-state

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.

New Books: Information Literacy

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Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, New Books

October is National Information Literacy Awareness Month. According to Wesleyan University information literacy is: “Information literacy is a crucial skill in the pursuit of knowledge. It involves recognizing when information is needed and being able to efficiently locate, accurately evaluate, effectively use, and clearly communicate information in various formats.” Read more about their discussion.

Call Number: 020.285 P159b Title: Biblio Tech:Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google Author: John Palfrey

Call Number: 153.15 C273h Title: How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens Author: Benedict Carey

Call Number: 153.42 L579o Title: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload Author: Daniel J. Levitin

Call Number: 153.8 L653c Title: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It Author: Ian Leslie

Call Number: 302.23 K264i Title: The Internet is NOT the Answer Author: Andrew Keen

Call Number: 303.48 P388s Title: Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from a New Science Author: Alex Pentland

Call Number: 303.483 R953p Title: Present Shock: When Everything Happens NOW Author: Douglas Rushkoff

Call Number: 343.099 M657p Title: Privacy in the New Media Age Author: Jon L. Mills

Call Number: 346.73 S924c Title: The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (5th ed.) Author: William S. Strong

Call Number: 364.16 L665f Title: Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying The Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back Author: Robert Levine

Call Number: 573.86 S972b Title: Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan (2nd ed) Author: Larry W. Swanson

Call Number: 616.042 M687i Title: Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives and Our Lives Change Our Genes Author: Sharon Moalem

Call Number: 658.4 B B496m Title: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas Author: Warren Berger

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 Copyright

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Copyright, Creative Commons, Information Literacy, Information Literacy Awareness Month, National Information Awareness, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, User License Agreement

 During the month of October we have been doing posts relating to National Information Literacy Awareness Month and how you can increase your information literacy. This is our last Information Literacy post of this year. We hope you have enjoyed them. Leave a comment if you have a question or suggestion for a topic for next October. In today’s post, we’re taking a brief look at copyright.

Copyright is a complicated subject so this is just going to skim the surface, but I think the basic facts will be helpful. It’s such a complicated subject that most such summaries include a sentence like, this is NOT legal advice and I am NOT a lawyer, contact a lawyer for further information (so there’s mine). Copyright is, at its most basic, a right to copy. It was designed to encourage production of new ideas and writings by making sure people could make enough money off their work to keep them producing more. Copyright is also designed to expire (although laws keep pushing that date farther and farther away) so that the general population could build on and expand on those previously created works building new things and creations for the good of society. For example, Walt Disney Productions can take out of copyright fairytales like Snow White collected by the Brothers Grimm and make the movie Snow White or Seth Grahame-Smith can take the out of copyright novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and make Pride and Prejudice with Zombies.

Anytime you make a copy of a work still under copyright protection, without permission or without falling within fair use guidelines, you have violated the laws governing copyright. Some things to keep in mind as a student:

• Not everything you copy or manipulate for a class is considered fair use (otherwise known as OK to do) because you are a student.
• That fact that it’s technically easy to use someone else’s work (to download, copy, manipulate, paste in a paper or a PowerPoint, etc.), doesn’t mean it’s legal to do so.
• There are places where people post stuff that they want you to copy, so you can use them without asking permission, for example Creative Commons. You can find creative commons photos by searching Photo Pin.
• Even when you are using something with permission, most people require a photo credit or a citation giving credit that you are using their work in your project.
• You may think it’s OK to do something because you get away with breaking copyright law once, but if you are caught the consequences can be a cease-and-desist order, a fine, or even a lawsuit. The fact that you had done it many times before without getting in trouble won’t help your case.
• When you sign up for some program or website (like Facebook or Pinterest) you are often asked to click agree on something called Terms and Conditions. When you click agree make sure you understand that you are agreeing to abide to stricter measures on copyright and giving up control of your work among other things. It’s a good idea to actually read them before clicking.
• When you buy a program, etc. it often comes with the license, and license restrictions are often much, much stricter than copyright. By agreeing to the license you are agreeing to follow these stricter rules, but again make sure you know what they are before you agree to them.

Learn more about copyright for students with this handout from Iowa Area Education Agencies:
http://www.iowaaeaonline.org/vnews/display.v/ART/48d13d04446d2

See past Kirkwood related blog posts on:

• Facebook and Copyright
  https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/facebook-and-copyright
• Copyright Tools (including those specifically for Kirkwood Students and Faculty)
  https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/copyright-tools-from-the-university-of-minnesota
• Not Everything is on the Internet
  https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/everything-is-not-on-the-internet

Also find books on copyright in the collection around 346 and many more are available as e-books through the catalog.

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 Passwords

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Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Passwords, Strong Passwords

During the rest of October we will be doing posts relating to National Information Literacy Awareness Month and how you can increase your information literacy. In today’s post were looking at how to be smart about passwords.

So many people do it. You come up with one password and use it over and over again across the web. It’s easy to remember and what’s the big deal? Hackers know people do this and if they steal information from one website, which lists e-mails and passwords they may try them again on another site they like to access. Instead of always going with an easy to remember password, it’s a good idea to just plan on writing down your passwords and keep them handy that way so you don’t have to worry about not remembering them. Or if you can’t write them down, try to make them easy for you to remember & hard for anyone to hack (see stronger passwords article below). While it may not be that big a deal if a site where you use a discussion board of something gets hacked and no important personal information is stolen, if you use the same passwords for different important websites you’ve just handed hackers the keys for accessing your other accounts. So watch what password you use where.

Also, you might just want to up your game on the passwords you do use. Each year SplashData collects already compromised data to look for the most commonly used passwords. If you use any of the passwords on this list (each complete with a hilarious snarky comment), change it now in honor of National Information Literacy Awareness Month.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/01/22/_25_worst_passwords_what_your_terrible_common_password_says_about_you.html

Want to change to a stronger password? Check out his suggestion.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/12/08/how_to_create_a_secure_password_that_s_easy_to_remember.html

And learn more about passwords:
http://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-guide-to-password-security-and-why-you-should-care/

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 Social Media

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Information Literacy, Information Literacy Month, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Pew Research Center, Social Media

 It’s Information Literacy Month and Pew Research Center has taken a look at Social Media.

The Pew Research Center is a bipartisan research center that conducts studies to provide useful knowledge to the public. A recent study looked at how people engage in news through social media. They examined most of the big social media sites. Most people don’t turn to them for news. The biggest number who do are on Facebook, mostly because they have the highest number of users, but the news looked at is mostly having to do with entertainment. Twitter users were the most engaged. However, news, especially engaged at all with politics or political correctness, has very little actual discussion online (even on Twitter which is all about discussion) because people are unlikely to engage with those with differing opionions and are reluctant to post something that contradicts the views of their friends. In other words, if you only see one point of view in your various timelines, it doesn’t really mean that’s what everybody thinks or that it’s the one correct way to view it.

Read more here:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news

And be sure to find Kirkwood Libraries at Facebook and YouTube.

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.