Library News Blog

Maria Kiriakova

By the time you read this, Spring will have arrived. It will have brought sunshine and flowers and the possibility of new beginnings. Thinking about new plans, the Library would like to start an ideas list for the “library of the future.” In the last decade, many innovations in the world of academic libraries have already come to fruition on our campus: easy remote online access to the millions of library resources (databases, ebooks, full-text journals); streaming videos; getting instant help from professional librarians through email and chat; the ability to search hundreds of databases at once through the Google-like OneSearch; inserting the library toolkit (along with an embedded librarian) into a Blackboard course... Just to name a few wonders. In the library’s physical world, the books are constantly updated and shifted; the lab is equipped with new computers and is open around the clock during finals period; scanners and print stations are available on both floors; countertops have been built and high stools added for laptop users; the classroom has been upgraded with new projection screens... The list goes on.

We would like to collect data on what faculty and staff would like to see in the library of the future. Let us know about what you have experienced yourself or read about other libraries around the country and the world. Please send your thoughts to us by email or to any of the librarians at the Sealy Library. 

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Ellen Belcher & Matt Murphy

In addition to anxiously awaiting the opening of our new state-of-the-art Special Collections Room, we have been busy acquiring and cataloging some interesting items. Below is a selection of what we have acquired in the last year. All of these items are available to researchers by appointment in our current Special Collections Room. Please contact Ellen Belcher with any questions about these or anything in our Special Collections.

At left: c. 1890s “Oh you policewoman….” Broadside-valentine with a caricature of a policewoman. A digital copy of this broadside will be uploaded to our Digital Collections.

Rare books and broadsides recently acquired

1889 (New York) Police Signal Telegraphs: The Gamewell Fire Alarm Telegraph Company, New York. This title is freely digitally available through SMU Libraries. This catalog offers the latest state-of-the-art (at the time) alarm and communication systems to police and private security firms. It also features the company’s offering in horse drawn police patrol wagons. 

1901 (New York) Volunteer prison work. A small pamphlet by Maud Ballington Booth, describing her efforts to help incarcerated men reenter society, specifically through the opening of “Hope Halls,” which acted as halfway houses. Apart from being a well-known prison reformer, Booth helped co-found Volunteers of America. 

1905 (Philadelphia) Jacob Reed’s Sons Uniforms Police & Firemen. This catalog includes a variety of uniforms, badges, insignia, whistles, handcuffs, leggings, hats, helmets and nightsticks. This copy is marked with pencil marks, presumably made by an agency choosing uniforms and accessories for their force. (See image at right.)

1919 (Ottawa) Annual Report of the Canadian Criminal Identification Bureau to the Chief Commissioner of the Dominion Police. This report documents an initiative which began sharing of fingerprint records between police agencies in North America. 

1928 (Detroit) Annual report of the Detroit Police Department Women’s Division. It is interesting to note that Detroit was not represented in the meeting of the heads of the “women’s bureaus” in 1927. (See image below.)

1956 (Warwick, NY) New York Training School for Boys, Disciplinary Practices. A small pamphlet discusses ways to deal with behavioral problems of boys incarcerated at this reform school. Includes sections on “What a Boy Does Not Like” and “What a Boy Likes” with emphasis on confidence building and conflict resolution. 

(Above) “Heads of Women’s Bureaus Gather in Convention.” 12th Annual Convention of Policewomen, Cleveland, Ohio. Police Journal August 1927 p. 19. (Periodicals HV7551 .P57)

(Above) 1912 (Chicago) The Black Traffic in White Girls. White Slavery as Now Practiced in America, Including Detailed Descriptions of the Customs and Manners of the White Women Slaves and Wives of Asia, Turkey, Egypt, etc. This book is one of many cheap paperbacks on “White Slavery” marketed to a variety of readers. In its description of sex workers and sex trafficking in Chicago, it served both as a warning to parents of women who sought independent lives in the big city and as soft-core porn to those interested in specifics of sex work practices.

(Above) 1823 (Paris) Les hermites en prison, ou, Consolations de Sainte-Pélagie A work by Etienne de Jouy (the pseudonym of Victor-Joseph-Etienne de Jouy) and Antoine Jay, both of whom served time in Paris’ Sainte-Pélagie prison. The work is chiefly a discussion of penology, but of note is a chapter on New York’s notorious Newgate prison, accompanied by this illustration depicting the prison.

(Above) 1880s? Photo of men posing in and on a horse-drawn carriage labeled “Hecker Bunch.” On August 1, 1883, The New York Times reported on a large fire which started and spread from the Hecker and Co. Flour Mill at 464 Water St. Perhaps this photo is related to that event? A fireman lays on top of the carriage.

Manuscript (archival) collections recently acquired

April 1833. A hand written account of Sing Sing Prison for the month of April 1833 signed by Dr. Robert Wiltse, warden, A. Graham, John Sing, commissioners, on May 18, 1833. 

1905-1913 Notebook of the Chief Marshal of Dover, N.H. Detailed notes on arrests and raids, mainly related to enforcing prohibition laws in New Hampshire. 

January 20, 1913. American Fire Apparatus, 1 Madison Ave. Estimate for installing fire escapes and fire fighting apparatus for Manitou Putnam Company, property owners of 17 East 74th Street. 

1931–1935 Joseph “Specs” Russell Papers. See Larry Sullivan's article in this newsletter with more information on this collection. 

1960–2000s Joyce ‘Rocky’ Flint Collection on Jeffrey Dahmer. Documents collected by Dr. Kathleen Fitzgerald as a result of her collaboration with Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother to write a book, which was never completed. 

Elizabeth Williams Collection of Courtroom Drawings. Additions to our existing collection of Elizabeth Williams’ courtroom art, many of which were on exhibit in the Shiva Gallery this past Fall. 

Aggie Whelan Kenny Collection of Courtroom Drawings. A new collection of courtroom drawings, many of which were on exhibit in the Shiva Gallery this past Fall. 

1960s–2004 Jeremy Travis Personal Papers. Papers collected during the career of Jeremy Travis at Yale, NYU, NYPD, NIJ, DOJ, Urban Institute, and under Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Chuck Schumer and Ed Koch, before he became president of John Jay College in August of 2004. 

1951–1960s Jack LaTorre Collection Ten boxes of files related to the NYPD investigation of the March 8, 1951 homicide of Arnold Schuster. 

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The numbers from July 2016 to June 2017

Marta Bladek

The Library gate count registered over 350,828 visits, an increase of 3.3% from the previous academic year.

The Library home page registered 1.3 million pageviews from 240,000 unique computers. Users came from 188 countries around the world. 

65% of users accessed the website from off-campus, a 7% increase from previous year.

Students made great use of the Library’s five group study rooms. There were 1,820 group study room reservations. The highest demand coincided with midterms and finals.

John Jay librarians answered over 8,800 reference questions at the reference desk, over the phone, by email and chat. These one-on-one interactions added up to over 700 hours, or the equivalent of 30 days, of answering queries.

Librarians taught 188 full-period instruction sessions and visited 45 classes for shorter presentations. ENG 101 accounted for the majority of the instruction sessions.

John Jay faculty, students, and staff downloaded over 812,000 journal articles provided by the Library databases. Approximately 73% of those articles were downloaded by John Jay students and faculty working from home. 

eReserves featured 497 active course pages, containing 2,664 items. eReserve course pages were viewed 42,560 times, with 73,152 individual document hits.

As of June 2017, there were 1,264 users registered with Interlibrary Loan. Faculty accounted for 33% and graduate students for 38% of those who request items from other libraries. (Staff and undergraduate students account for the remaining 28% of ILL users.) The ILL department processed 1,525 requests, which marked an increase of almost 10% in comparison to the previous year. 

32 researchers consulted the Library’s Special Collections, visiting the Library a total of 72 times. The Lloyd Sealy Library and Special Collections staff were acknowledged in four book-length publications whose authors worked extensively with our collections.

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See more facts, stats, and figures »

Maria Kiriakova

One would think that with the rise of globalization the borders between countries would move into the sphere of imagination. But in recent years, the topic of borders and walls has become one of the most debated all over the world. Below is just a short list of books from the collections of the Lloyd Sealy Library on the topic of border studies. There are many more materials available in our databases in the form of other books, articles from scholarly and popular sources, as well as videos and movies. Do a search in the online discovery tool OneSearch using such words as border or boundaries or border patrol or border wall, etc.

• Backmann, R., & Kaiser, A. (2010). A Wall in Palestine. New York: Picador. 
  • Stacks DS 119.65. B3313 2010
• Buckley, W. F. (2004). The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
  • Stacks DD 881. B797 2004
• Elizondo Griest, S. (2017). All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. borderland. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 
  • Stacks F 395. M5 E45 2017
• Hensel, J. (2004). After the Wall: Confessions from an East German childhood and the life that came next. New York: Public Affairs. 
  • Stacks HQ 799.G3 H45613 2004
• Kassabova, K. (2017). Border: A journey to the edge of Europe. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.
  • Stacks DR 50.7. K37 2017
• Lew-Williams, B. (2018). The Chinese must go: Violence, exclusion, and the making of the alien in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Stacks E184.C5 L564 2018
• Loyd, J. M., Mitchelson, M., & Burridge, A. (2012). Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, borders, and global crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
  • Ebook
• Maril, R. L. (2011). The Fence: National security, public safety, and illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press.
  • Stacks JV 6565. M37 2001
• Rael, R., & Cruz, T. (2017). Borderwall As Architecture: A manifesto to the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 
  • Stacks F787. R33 2017
• Rieber, A. J. (2014). The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the rise of the early modern empires to the end of the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Stacks DS 5. R54 2014
• Spyrou, S., & Christou, M. (2014). Children and Borders. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Ebook
• Wastl-Walter, D. (2011). The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies. Farnham: Taylor and Francis.
  • Ebook

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Ellen Sexton

The John Jay community is making good use of our streaming media platforms—though because we only collect aggregated data, we don’t know who is watching, or why. We assume that the most watched titles are being assigned as class viewing. In general, usage peaks during the Spring and Fall semesters, and drops off during January intercession and the summer. The most watched videos are documentaries. Below is some data from our three most popular platforms. 

Alexander Street: includes American History in Video; Counseling and Therapy in Video; Criminal Justice and Public Safety in Video; Ethnographic Video Online; Human Rights Studies Online; Psychological Experiments Online; and the PBS Video Collection.

Films on Demand: Over 10,000 documentaries, dramas, and newsreels from the world

Kanopy: Currently streaming about 200 documentaries, feature films and instructional films to the John Jay community.

(Please note as of 4/19/2018, for financial reasons, we have had to cease our PDA model and are no longer able to offer our users the ability to choose and add more videos to our Kanopy collection themselves.  Our access is currently restricted to films users have already viewed sufficient times to have triggered licenses. Faculty wishing to request special access to specific titles should contact the media librarian Ellen Sexton. Please note that New York Public Library provides access to a much larger collection.)

Top 12 videos from each platform for the calendar year 2017

Platforms: Alexander Street, Kanopy, Films On Demand.

See our Media Guide for more about the Library’s collections of documentaries, feature films, training films, and more, in streaming and DVD formats.  Please contact the librarian responsible for media, Ellen Sexton, with questions, comments, acquisition suggestions.

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Maureen Richards

With the introduction of powerful library resource discovery tools like CUNY’s OneSearch—which allows you to access the content in a majority (but not all) of the library’s databases through a single platform—it is getting harder to make the case for searching library databases one at a time. However, there are exceptions, and World Scholar: Latin America & the Caribbean is among them. (So is Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture, also featured in this newsletter.) These databases are the result of extensive collaborations among scholars, researchers and archivists, seeking ways to make unique archival collections available to a larger audience. 

World Scholar: Latin America & the Caribbean aims to be comprehensive in scope by covering the politics, economics, culture, environment, and international affairs of this region.  Although keyword searching is possible, the best first step is to get familiar with the way this database is organized by browsing through its three main categories: topics, statistics, and historical collections. It covers about 350 topics that are organized within 11 categories ranging from agriculture to war and diplomacy. You will also find a myriad of statistics about this region, including those that focus on the environment, health, and infrastructure. The archival content, though not as expansive, includes 34 historical collections with documents dating from the 15th through the 20th century. The content of the database is overseen by an Advisory Board of academics (including Peter Manuel, a professor of ethnomusicology here at John Jay, who serves as a consultant).

The easiest way to take advantage of the strength of this database is to select one of the topics from the list. Similar to the entries you would find in an encyclopedia, the topics provide a brief overview, followed by secondary sources (like academic journals, reference materials, and news, including news feeds), related archival materials from the historical collections (including monographs, original manuscripts, signed letters, expedition records, maps, and diaries), and any relevant statistics. 

For example, if you select “Judiciary in Latin America” from the topics list, after reading a brief overview, you get instant access to a panoply of secondary sources, a news feed, and statistics on how many women serve as judges in Latin American courts. You can also see quickly that there are 17 historical monographs from the archival materials related to this topic.  In addition, if any of these documents are in unfamiliar language, you can simply click on “translate” to have it instantly translated. (But note that these automated translations may not make for the smoothest reading.)

Why use this database?

Use the World Scholar database if you are looking for a blend of secondary and archival sources relating to Latin America and the Caribbean region. It is particularly appropriate for undergraduates who may be unfamiliar with how to gather the different types of sources used in the research process. For more library resources on Latin America and Latina/o Studies see the library’s LLS research guide or ask a librarian.

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Marta Bladek

The Library’s growing collection of primary sources databases now includes Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920. Focused on trends in crime, as well as on judicial and penal reforms during the long 19th century, this digital archive also features press coverage and popular culture responses to crime and punishment. Although it is multilingual and international in scope, it is nevertheless mostly composed of British and American collections that include Crime and the Criminal Justice System: Records from The U.K. National Archives, 1780-1923; Nineteenth Century Crime: Manuscripts from the American Antiquarian Society, 1750-1923; Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, 1845-1920; and many others. Over 2.1 million pages of historical documents ranging from trial transcripts, police reports, newspaper articles, prisoner photographs, penal reform treatises, to examples of the emerging genre of crime fiction, capture the period’s pivotal role in defining crime and establishing responses to it. 

Given the wealth of primary sources the database contains, researchers have multiple options to explore its depth. For example, keywords can refer to types of crimes (robbery, arson), locations (saloon, alley, gutter), motives (revenge, love), substances (absinthe, opium), weapons used (rifle, revolver), or types of punishment (solitary confinement, capital punishment). As always, using the Advanced Search allows for a more guided and tailored search. It is possible to limit the search to a specific collection or publication. Moreover, types of text documents can be narrowed (case overview, public notice, sermon, and many more) and so can types of illustrated works (cartoons, drawing, photograph, among others).

In addition to these filters, Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 features term frequency and term cluster tools that are worth exploring. For example, when searching for records on “solitary confinement,” a glance at the term frequency tool reveals that the use of the term increased dramatically in the 1840s, a period when the practice was widely debated:

The practice had been variously described in the preceding decades: “solitary imprisonment,” “solitude,” and “unremitted solitude” are some of the terms previously used. After selecting the year 1846, the researcher can view all 15 documents that mention it. The term frequency tool, then, captures the moment when specific concepts and practices came to the forefront in discussions around crime and punishment. 

The term cluster tool can be used to visualize which words and subjects are found most often in the text of search results. Word clusters might bring up expected connections, along with unexpected but commonly related terms, inviting researchers to explore new approaches to their subject. For example, the cluster for “solitary confinement” shows that “petitions,” “prison” and “reports on criminals” are terms that were found most often in the same documents “solitary confinement” appeared:

To illustrate how the cluster tool may inform new research: a closer look at the documents in the “petitions” sub-cluster may lead a researcher to investigate the length of solitary confinement sentences during a given time period, as well as spark an analysis of which kinds of appeals had been the most successful.

Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 is particularly useful to those already familiar with the period and themes it covers. This digital resource is uniquely designed to spark new lines of scholarly inquiry. Well-suited for classes examining the history of crime and punishment and their philosophies and practices, it is also a great teaching tool for assignments that rely on primary sources.

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A citation database for the sciences and beyond

Karen Okamoto

Scopus abstracts and indexes peer-reviewed, scientifically significant literature in the social sciences, medicine, and physical and life sciences. With records for publications dating as early as 1788 and cited references dating back to 1970, Scopus’s depth of content is increasing as it continues to compete with the Web of Science, another well-known citation index to which the John Jay Library also subscribes. Content types in Scopus include journals, books, conference materials and trade journals from publishers around the world.

Scopus’s content coverage by subject area (source PDF):

For researchers, Scopus provides several helpful features and filters to increase search precision. Users can, for example, limit their search to funding sources, articles in press, and fully open access journal articles. Search results can also be limited to content uploaded within the last seven days, demonstrating the timeliness of Scopus’s data, which is updated daily. 

For authors and those interested in publication analytics, Scopus generates impressive visual displays of these metrics and offers various citation alert options. For example, users can create alerts each time a particular publication is cited, or they can “follow” particular researchers and their publications. Authors can also retrieve Scopus’s metrics for specific journals, helping authors choose between journals to which they might submit manuscripts. In addition, it provides an author search which lists all the publications by an author as indexed in Scopus. Scopus generates a bar and line graph to illustrate documents indexed and the number of citations for a publication by year.

Sample analytics for an author, displaying documents and citations indexed by Scopus:

Graphs plotting the number of publications for a given institution can also be generated by Scopus.

Subjects of John Jay faculty publications from 1969 to the present:

Scopus’s content and features are impressive, but it is important to keep in mind the limitations of any database or bibliometric tool. Scopus provides analytics for the content it indexes, which may not be completely comprehensive. Other citation indexes such as the Web of Science and Google Scholar may provide different results and numbers for the same publication and author. Web of Science, for example, claims to have over 100 million records (source, PDF) while Scopus has over 69 million (source, PDF). Comparing these analytics can be revealing and instructive. 

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Even spy agencies are using shareable, open sources... We can, too!

Vee Herrington

There has been lots of hype and increased awareness in higher education over the past few years about openness, sharing, and equity in education. Colleges and universities across the US and even the world are trying to make education more affordable and accessible with open educational resources (OER). OERs are any material used for education where the restrictions of traditional copyright have been waived or do not exist; therefore, these materials are free for the students to use.

At over an 800% increase in the past 10 years, college textbook costs have increased faster than medical services, new home prices and three times the rate of inflation (US Public Interest Research Group, 2014). Eighty-five percent of students have delayed or avoided purchasing textbooks, with 91 percent citing cost as the reason. To make matters worse, half of the students reported that their grades have been negatively impacted by their decision (Wakefield Research, 2017). If a course centers around a textbook, inequity exists if some students cannot purchase the textbook.

What is CUNY and specifically, John Jay College, doing about lowering textbook costs, since almost 40% of CUNY students come from households with annual incomes of less than $20,000 per year? New York State awarded CUNY $4,000,000 for OER initiatives to be spent in FY 2018 to help faculty convert courses to using free educational materials, instead of expensive proprietary textbooks. Using a share of the state funding, John Jay is promoting OER with the Course Conversion Project. The grant is administered out of the Teaching and Learning Center and the office of Educational Partnerships and General Education. With 16 participants, the objective is to convert five courses (each with five sections) using textbooks and other materials with a “zero cost to students.” Most of the courses are general education, high enrollment classes.  

In addition to a stipend for the participating faculty, the funding provides for eight OER conversion seminars focusing on course design, pedagogy, the selection and evaluation of OER materials, and the technology needed to host the materials. Even though library resources, such as ebooks and journal articles, are copyrighted and not considered OER, these rich resources are zero cost to the students and were also addressed in the seminars. Since it may be difficult to find one perfect OER textbook, the participants were trained in using the Library’s discovery tool OneSearch to locate materials (chapters in various books, journal articles, etc.) that support the various learning outcomes. Unique to John Jay, the grant also supports the publication of the John Jay College OER Justice eReader, which, under the guidance of a faculty Editorial Board, will bring together a collection of key texts that will function as an intellectual hub for conversations focusing on justice. 

I was hired for 15 hours per week to support this college-wide OER initiative at John Jay. This is not my first experience of promoting OER adoption; I wrote one of the first successful OER grants in CUNY when I was Chief Librarian and Director of Academic Technology at Guttman Community College. Previously, I had been involved in the “open-source” (not classified) research movement for over 10 years while working for the Department of Defense. Even though that was a different kind of open movement, there are many similarities. I gave research classes on using open source materials (publicly available sources) and taught the military how to search for and find open source materials to use in Open-source Intelligence (OSINT). OSINT includes information available that is not classified, clandestine or covert and is used for intelligence gathering and analysis. Since these resources are open, they are easy to share without needing a security clearance. I introduced my students at the Intel School to various CIA and FBI databases of open source materials and other tools.

As the OER Librarian at John Jay, I am  assisting in the planning and leading of the OER seminars, and I work one-on-one with the faculty participants. I help them find OER resources and talk to them about understanding and applying Creative Commons licensing.  I’m focused on keeping the participants on track and progressing towards the grant goals.  I maintain the Course Conversion participants Blackboard site and assist with the Justice eReader Group site.

Outreach and promotion of OER to the entire John Jay faculty is key to growing this movement. In March, the Library held a Pop-Up Library event during Community Hour. Students were asked to indicate how much they spent on books this semester by placing a sticker on a board (see image at left). We handed out bookmarks with directions on how students can search for “zero cost textbook” classes in CUNYfirst. Other OER events have been organized on campus, including an OER workshop for faculty held during Faculty Development Day in January. 

Another important aspect of the OER project focuses on technology. Once the class is designed, the syllabus completed and the OER materials gathered, the participants need a virtual place for hosting the course, so the students have easy access. LibGuides, CUNY Academic Works, Moodle, ePortfolio, WordPress, Blackboard, and Lumen Learning are all possible as platforms for OER classes. Many of the participants in the project chose LibGuides as the hosting platform for their OER converted classes. These course guides are like a mini-website and include all the materials (including the OER textbook or readings) needed for the course, and are viewable by anyone, thus sharable with the world, one of the important premises of the OER movement. Besides being visually appealing and easy to use, LibGuides are already licensed by John Jay. This platform has many robust features, such as reusability and the ability to move and copy content easily.

In summary, John Jay College is working hard to develop and enhance new and ongoing OER initiatives. CUNY’s goal is to establish the University as a national leader in OER (The City University of New York, 2018). The project initiative at John Jay is a big success, with new inquiries weekly from faculty wanting to participate. We hope the grant will be renewed for next year so more classes can be converted. The OER movement will save students money, but also enhance their learning experience. OER is about sharing and promoting educational and social equity.

References

2017 Wakefield Research. (2017). Retrieved from VitalSource.

The City University of New York. (2018). Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from CUNY Libraries.

U.S. Public Interest Research Group. (2014, January 27). Fixing the Broken Textbook Market. Retrieved from U.S. PIRG.

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Robin Davis

Internet privacy is a moving target. With new technologies emerging at a steady clip, it can be difficult to keep up with how best to keep your data safe while using the web. I’ve highlighted 3 things you can do to stay secure on the web.

Two-factor authorization is offered by many email and banking services as a way to lock out hacking attempts. The two factors required to gain entry to your account are a password (most common way to authorize access) and something else that only you would have access to, most often your mobile phone. So even if a hacker swiped your password—by finding a Post-It note taped to your monitor or, more likely, buying passwords in bulk on the Internet’s black market—they would lack the second required factor. For instance, Bank of America offers SafePass, which you can set up such that when you try to transfer a large amount of money to someone, the bank will text a 6-digit code to your phone. You’ll need to input this code before the transfer can go through. Check twofactorauth.org to see if your bank, email service, health app, or other service offers two-factor authorization.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) are one way to stay secure while on a public, open network, such as a café’s wifi. While on that café’s wifi, other people on the same network could potentially spy on you to see the things you view and send online, just as if they were looking over your shoulder. A VPN blocks them from spying on you by encrypting the things you view and send. The world of VPNs can, admittedly, be very confusing—there are a thousand “Best VPN” lists and none of them seem that neutral or reliable. After all, the VPN company does see the things you view and send, so they might be incentivized to go to the dark side and make money off of your data. Luckily, John Jay offers faculty its own VPN, meaning you can access the John Jay network even while off-campus and feel more secure about using public wifi. You’ll need to install a VPN client, which, once installed, will require you to log in with your usual John Jay credentials whenever you want to use it. Just call DoIT (ext. 8200) to request VPN access and client installation. 

Check location services settings often on your mobile phone. Make sure that only the apps you trust most have access to your current and past locations. What funny business might an app get up to with your location data? Uber, for instance, tracked users’ locations 5 minutes after their ride ended, ostensibly for passenger safety, though that seemed a weak excuse in light of Uber’s past misuses of user data. (They rolled this back in 2017 after strong pushback.) Strava, a running app, tracked users’ runs and added them to their publicly viewable map of Strava runs all over the globe, not realizing that it pinpointed secret U.S. military bases where staff kept track of their exercise with the app. (Strava has since declared it would clear the public map every month.) The point is, even big-name apps might use your location data in fishy or insecure ways. Recently, privacy advocates have pushed for greater transparency: app store administrators have asked app developers to be more explicit about when and why they need user location data, and smartphones will now typically light up a little location pin icon to let you know that an app is currently tracking your location. It still pays to be extra careful about whom you allow to see your physical location, so check your location services settings on a regular basis.

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