T3: Passwords and Your Digital Life

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Diana

Your Digital Life wordcloudPasswords! There are so many passwords, PINS, and other security steps we have to juggle when doing almost anything online. Even though these can be painful to manage, it is really important to use strong, secure passwords that people (or computer programs) with malicious intent cannot guess or hack. Online security is the foundation of creating and maintaing a successful digital environment.

Many of you have heard about the Heartbleed Bug that allowed hackers to gain access to sensitive information on many websites by exploiting an error in a commonly used software code. Now that it’s the end of the semester, you should have more time to change all your passwords on the sites that were affected. The website Mashable.com has a comprehensive list of affect sites and suggested actions for you to take: http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/

But how do you create new, secure passwords for most of your online needs? Here are some tips about what NOT to use:

  • personal information such as your name or birthdate
  • keyboard patterns such as QWERTY or 12345
  • repeating characters
  • words you find in the dictionary
  • the same passwords for multiple accounts
  • an example of a good password that you found online
  • all letters, all numbers, or all special characters—mix it up!
Password tips info graph

Image from Lifehacker

Password Generators and Managers

So, how do you maintain passwords when you need to have a different, strong, password for each account you have? How do you keep track of passwords if the best possible password is one that is difficult to remember? Password generators and managers are a good solution to this problem. These software programs and services interact with individual websites on your behalf and create unique, difficult passwords for each online account you have. These programs do not store your passwords in “the cloud” or on their servers-the passwords are stored locally on your computer in an encrypted format.

Here are some reputable services if you want to use a password generator:
https://lastpass.com/
http://keepass.info/
https://agilebits.com/

Remember: the best password is one that you don’t know yourself!

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Andersen Library Exam Hours

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Barbara

Andersen Library will extend its hours for exam study beginning Fri., May 9. The Food for Thought cafe is open 8am-8pm Monday-Thursday, May 12-15. Popcorn will be made at about 9 p.m. only on dates indicated with an asterisk (*) below (May 11-15). Coffee & cocoa will be available after 9pm May 9-15.

Fri. May 9:   7:30am – 10pm
Sat., May 10:   9am – 10pm
Sun., May 11*:   9am – 2am
Mon., May 12*:   7am – 2am
Tues., May 13*:   7am – 2am
Wed., May 14*:   7am – 2am
Thurs. May 15*:   7am – 2am
Fri. May 16:   7am – 6pm
Sat., May 17:   10am – 6pm
Sun., May 18:   11am – 8pm

 
The first and third floors of the Library close at midnight; only 2nd/main floor is open from midnight until 2am. All three floors are open until closing on nights when then Library closes earlier than 2am. Doors are locked 15 minutes before closing.

collage of images of students studyingStudy hard and good luck, everybody!

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Relaxathon Events!!

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Rebecca

Andersen Library is busting stress this semester with its longest Relaxathon yet! The week will feature events aimed to lower the stress level of UW-Whitewater students during the time leading up to exams. All activities will be held on the main floor of the Andersen Library and will run now through the end of the Spring semester.

This year there will be even more ways to let loose and relax at the library. Make a stress ball, a DIY nametag or bookmark, write on our graffiti wall, or make you friends or family cards for graduation or mothers/fathers day! Love to knit or crochet? Help make scarves to donate families in the Whitewater area for next winter!

IMG_20140425_152022_429

  • Balloon stress ball making – May 5th & 8th from 12-4PM
  • Do-it-yourself laminated nametag, luggage tag, or bookmark -May 6th & 7th from Noon-4pm.

We can’t forget about the therapy dogs!  There will be Pet Therapy sessions from 12-2pm, unless otherwise noted, on April 28, May 7 (1-3pm), May 8, May 12, and May 15!

Throughout the year Andersen Library hosts fun and educational events for students such as the Resume Doctor, the Big Read, pet therapy, and the Global Café.  Have an idea for an event, contest, or activity the library should get involved with?  Let us know at LibraryPR@uww.edu!

 

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New Stuff Tuesday – May 6, 2014

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Carol

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring:
Produced and Written by Neil Goodwin
Browsing DVD QH545 .P4 R23 2007
New Arrivals, 2nd floor

Rachel Carson wasn’t the kind of person to start a revolution. But that’s exactly what happened when she published her best known book, Silent Spring, in 1962. She was a biologist with the U.S. government when she began to notice that the birds and wildlife of her rural Pennsylvania childhood had all but disappeared from the landscape. She didn’t have to look far to find and document the cause. The publication of her book ruffled a lot of feathers in the chemical industry and elsewhere as she laid bare the consequences of unregulated pesticide use.

If you awoke this morning to the sound of chirping birds, that’s just one result of the environmental revolution sparked by Rachel Carson’s book. You can learn more about Carson’s life and legacy in this PBS American Experience documentary. If you’d rather read Silent Spring, Andersen Library has several copies of it.

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Money Mondays: Wrap Up

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Amanda Howell

This semester we have covered a wide variety of personal finance topics, from student loans to credit cards to retirement. These topics can be overwhelming, but hopefully you feel a little more confident in your ability to manage your finances so that you don’t end up living like this:

Payday

Here are the two overarching themes we’ve discussed this semester:

  • Save money for the future – Start setting aside money now for big things, like retirement, and smaller things like a vacation or concert tickets.
  • Don’t spend money you don’t have – You don’t have to match the national average price paid for a car or house. Create a budget and figure out what you can afford, then go from there.

If you can put these two ideas into practice, you will be much more financially stable than most. Below are a few more resources you may want to check out to enhance your personal finance know-how.

In Andersen Library:

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Stress buster: Online Jigsaw puzzles

Posted on May 3, 2014 by Barbara

Need a study break? Do you like jigsaw puzzles?

Try JigZone.com for online jigsaw puzzles, where you can select the theme, the difficulty (number of pieces), and the piece cut style of your puzzle! If you’re really, really stressed out, you can select “autosolve” and just watch the puzzle come together. And when you have time, you can create puzzles there using your own photos!

screenshot from Jigzone.com

If you prefer the real thing to a virtual jigsaw, Andersen Library has some jigsaws, as well as other games, including chess, checkers, Jenga, Mancala, Battleship, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and more…just ask!

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Latino Heritage Lecture May 6

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Barbara

Dr. Carmen Valdez, Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at UW-Madison, will talk about the “Impact of Family Stress and Sociocultural Context on Latino Youth’s Academic, Social, and Emotional Functioning” on Tues., May 6, at 3:45 p.m. in UC259A. It’s part of the Latino Heritage Lecture Series.

cover of Counseling Latinos bookAndersen Library has resources for learning more.

Search HALCat for titles such as Latinas attempting suicide: When cultures, families, and daughters collide (3rd-floor Main Collection, HV6546 .Z39 2011), Counseling latinos and La Familia: A practical guide (3rd-floor Main Collection, RC451.5.H57 S28 2002), and Mi voz, mi vida: Latino college students tell their life stories (3rd-floor Main Collection, LC2670.6 .M58 2007).

Search article databases to find titles such as “Acculturation-related stress and mental health outcomes among three generations of Hispanic adolescents” (Hispanic Journal Of Behavioral Sciences, 2013, vol.35:no.4, pp.451-468, doi:10.1177/0739986313500924), “Familismo, ethnic identity, and bicultural stress as predictors of Mexican American adolescents’ positive psychological functioning” (Journal Of Latina/O Psychology, 2013, vol.1:no.4, pp.204-217, doi:10.1037/lat0000006), “Academic achievement and depressive symptoms in low-income Latino youth” (Journal Of Child And Family Studies, 2012, vol.21:no.4, pp.565-577, doi:10.1007/s10826-011-9509-5), and “The Hispanic Stress Inventory—Adolescent Version: A culturally informed psychosocial assessment” (Psychological Assessment, 2012, vol.24:no.1, pp.187-196, doi:10.1037/a0025280).

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials, if desired.

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T3: Your Digital Life

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Diana

Your Digital Life Graphic

Starting next week and continuing through the summer, Tech Tips Thursday (T3) will focus on the theme of Your Digital Life. The summer is a great time to evaluate how, when, and where to create, find, store, manage, and publish information and media in a digital environment. This includes everything from the best place to store photos online to how to keep track of your Twitter account notifications. This 8-part, bi-weekly series will cover the following topics:

  • Passwords: Manage your passwords and keep them secure
  • Storage Space: Store and backup your digital files and archives
  • Social Media: Manage your accounts and maintain your desired level of privacy
  • Photos & Media: Share, manage, and store photos and other media
  • Notetaking: Capture information on the fly
  • Reading & Citation Management: Find and cite what you read both online and in hardcopy
  • Automation: Harness the power of websites and apps to automatically complete tasks
  • Optimize the Web: Make your web experience better using browser extensions, apps, and settings

If you want to keep track of this series, you can bookmark this post to see each post in the series as it appears, subscribe to the blog feed (http://blogs.uww.edu/library/feed) via a feed reader (examples: The Old Reader, Reeder, Feedly), or you can subscribe via your email (subscribe via Microsoft’s Outlook email program).

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Desperately seeking primary sources?

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Barbara

Are you in the Atlantic History course, or some other course for which you are looking up primary sources for periods like 1400-1800?? There are library guides for courses like Atlantic History that list databases to search for primary sources. Here are some tips for using Early English Books Online (EEBO), one of the primary source databases available to UW-Whitewater students and staff:

  1. Use AND between search terms on the search box, e.g., tobacco AND slaves. Another possibility that requires your search terms to be closer together is tobacco NEAR slaves

    2. Remember that you are looking up words used by the people who wrote these documents! They may not have used the spellings you expect, or even the words you expect, so read on to tip #2:

  2. Click the little text right of the search box “Check for variants” to get a list of possible spelling variants on your search terms, click the boxes for the possibilities you’d like to include in your search, and then click the blue “Select” box.
  3. Be sure to adjust the date period to be searched, or it will use the default (which runs from 1473-1900).
  4. Consider using the “SUBJECT KEYWORD(s):” Click “Select from a list” and type the beginning of a word, e.g., tobacc, click the blue “Search for” button, next you can highlight subjects from the list that appears, and then click the blue “OK” button to return to the search page.
    • To select a run of subjects on the list: click the first one that appeals and scroll down to the last one that appeals, hold down the Shift key and then click the last one that appeals.
    • To select scattered subjects, hold down the Ctrl key and click the ones you want to use.
  5. Now click “Search.”

Once you have the results, each one will tell you how many times your search words were found, e.g., “Found: 128 hit(s)”. Click the link below that (the title in blue) to get into the text. Click “-> First hit” to get to the first use of one of your search words in the text. Thereafter, use the arrows to go to the previous or next use of your search words.

The link “View document image” interspersed within the text allows you to see the page images.

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“Search, seizure, and cellphones”

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Barbara

image of smart phoneWould you want your cellphone searched by the police? Should they be able to do that without a warrant? Is your phone protected from that now? What about your privacy??

At 9 a.m. (Central) on Tuesday, April 29, the National Public Radio/WBUR program OnPoint will focus on “Search, seizure, and cellphones.” You can livestream programs from the WBUR (Boston) web site, or listen to the podcast of the program later.

Guests include Jacob Gershman, lead writer for The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog; Adam Gershowitz, professor of law at the William and Mary University Law School; Kevin Boyle, general counsel for the International Union of Police Associations, AFL-CIO; and Sheriff Grady Judd, Polk County, FL.

Andersen Library has resources for learning more. Search HALCat for titles such as the book Always on: How the iPhone unlocked the anything – anytime – anywhere future–and locked us in (3rd-Floor Main Collection, HM851 .C45 2011) and the Congressional committee hearing The Electronic Communications Privacy Act promoting security and protecting privacy in the digital age. Search article databases for resources such as “The Fourth Amendment in a world without privacy” (Mississippi Law Journal, vol.81:no.5, pp.1309-1355).

The SCOTUSblog talks about the U.S. Supreme Court taking on the “conflict between technology and privacy” in a couple of cases in the post “Court to rule on cellphone privacy” (Jan. 17, 2014). You can see briefs filed for Riley v California and United States v Wurie among the 2013-2014 Supreme Court Briefs posted at the American Bar Association web site. Oral arguments for both cases are scheduled for Tues., Apr. 29. The audio will be posted to the Supreme Court’s web site as well as to the Oyez Project web site, which also offers a video of a law school professor discussing the background of the case and its legal issues in “Riley v. California: Inside the Case.”

FDLP logo Andersen Library is a federal and Wisconsin depository library with federal and state government documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in various formats (print, DVD/CD-ROM, online). Check out your government at Andersen Library!

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