I participated in DLINQ’s Crypto Party for Activists and Allies and learned a lot about Tor. Of course I’d heard of Tor beforehand, but I didn’t know how it worked and I only associated it with criminal activity and spy stuff. Turns out it is also an important resource for reporters needing to communicate privately with sources and for activists who also need privacy and may need to thwart a home country’s censorship of the internet. I prepared for the session I was part of by reading about Tor from the resources about web browsers we were given. After the Crypto party, some things were still a little, well, cryptic for me, so I wanted to learn even more. There’s an hour long course on Linked In’s Lynda.com that is very clear and explained Tor and encryption in more detail. The instructor is really good and explained it in plain English (with graphics) for the non-specialist. Here’s the link for the Lynda course Learning Tor and the Dark Web(you’ll need to login with your Midd credentials – we are subscribers).
If you want to know about the other topics from the Crypto party and see all of the resources that were provided, visit the Crypto Party page.
ITS wants to make all employees and students aware of two
current serious Macbook recalls:
Recall #1:
Apple has issued a battery recall notice for “Mid-2015” model 15″ Macbook Pro laptops. The situation is a safety issue as according to Apple “the battery may overheat and pose a fire safety risk.”
Employees here at the college with college-issued Macbooks affected by this issue have been contacted via a WebHelpdesk ticket to arrange to have Apple repair their computer. Employees with personal computers and students are advised to use the above link to check their serial number and then follow the instructions on their website to arrange repair. Due to the nature of this repair, Apple is not allowing us to perform the repair in-house so your Macbook will need to be shipped to Apple for repair. Turn around will be 1 to 2 weeks and Apple advises users to shut down and stop using the computer until after it is repaired. If you store any files to the local hard drive, you will want to transition your data onto one of our cloud storage solutions, like OneDrive/Middfiles beforehand. With an off-site repair, data is not guaranteed to be intact, and our cloud storage options are backed up and accessible from just about anywhere.
Recall #2:
Another recall is for the SSD (hard drive) in some 13” non-touchbar Macbook Pro laptops. This problem can lead to data loss. To check your serial number, use this link:
The Davis Family Library will be open until 2 am starting Monday night, May 6th. Regular hours resume for Friday and Saturday, May 10th and 11th, then the 2 am closing will be in place for Sunday night through Thursday night. Regular hours resume for Friday and Saturday, May 17th and 18th. 2 am closing resumes for Sunday and Monday, then both Davis and Armstrong Libraries will close at 10 pm on Tuesday, May 21st. A reminder that you will need your college ID to access the building after 9 pm.
Armstrong Library will have regular hours until May 21st.
A full calendar of the hours can be found at go/hours
Literatures and Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer interviews Madeline “Maddie” Hope, the Assistant Director of Health & Wellness Education, for Mental Health Awareness Month. Visit the Davis Family Library to engage with a thematic display on this topic. Credits go to Dr. Raquel Albarrán of the Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies and students Jayla Johnson, Class of 2021, and Myles Maxie, Class of 2022, for the display’s design. Special thanks to Barbara Walter, Kat Cyr, Laura Kearley and Joseph Watson.
Professor Raquel Albarrán, Myles Maxie, Class of 2022, and Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer set up the Mental Health Awareness Month Display in the Davis Family Library lobby.
Katrina Spencer (KS): Hi, who are you? How long have you been here? What do you do on campus?
Maddie Hope (MH): Hi! I’m Maddie Hope. I’ve worked at Middlebury since July of 2018. I am a Health Educator, which means I provide trainings, one-on-one discussions and programs about topics related to health and wellness for students. My areas of focus are mental health, alcohol use and cannabis use. Come visit me in the Health and Wellness Education Office on the second floor of the Service Building. We have a massage chair!
Assistant Director of Health & Wellness Education Maddie Hope provides answers to important questions.
KS: What do you know about the display in the Davis Family Library?
MH: I know the display is focused on decreasing stigma related to discussing mental health challenges and providing different resources that can be accessed for support.
KS: Why is it important to reduce stigma surrounding mental health and illness?
MH: So often when people are struggling with mental health, they are also having a hard time connecting to themselves or others and stigma, or judgment, can make this problem worse. Stigma about mental health and mental illness is often the largest barrier to seeking support and feeling understood. These are two of the most important curative factors for mental health challenges. When we seek to understand the challenges others are facing rather than meeting them with judgment, we pave the way for healing.
KS: What resources are available on campus? To students? Staff? Faculty?
MH: For students, there is the Parton Center for Health and Wellness. Students can choose to speak to a counselor or a health care provider for mental health support. To make an appointment with a counselor, students can call 802-443-5141, or visit their office on the third floor of Centeno House. You can also read about counseling staff on campus at go/counseling/. If students are interested in meeting with a health care provider, they can call 802-443-3290, or visit their office on the first floor of Centeno House to make an appointment.
For staff and faculty, Human Resources provides a confidential service called Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP) which can provide short-term counseling services on a variety of topics and serve as a referral source for more long term services. More information can be found at go/EFAP/ or by inquiring with Human Resources.
KS: Are there any mental health counselors of color? And if not, what can community members do when they are seeking cultural familiarity and competency in their mental health care services?
MH: The Counseling staff at Middlebury is predominantly white-identified, but the counseling center is commiting to actively recruiting counselors of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.
This can certainly be a challenge. Community members have a few options here. It might be valuable to consider beginning an online counseling relationship. It may be helpful to search for a clinician in your home community or in Burlington, VT. Some counselors may be open to meeting completely online, or have a few sessions in person and then offer online appointments.
A few resources for finding a therapist who can provide cultural familiarity include:
A screenshot from the online directory Therapy for Black Girls
KS: Thank you for those resources above. How might the Health and Wellness Education Office and the Libraries collaborate in reducing the stigma surrounding mental health?
MH: Often the library can be a place students experience many overwhelming emotions (e.g. feeling fatigued from studying, experiencing frustration or hopelessness about assignments or workload). I can see some exciting potential to explore having consistent stress management events in the library for students, faculty and staff to enjoy. Providing opportunities to explore strategies to address overwhelming emotions together helps to show support for those who may have a hard time discussing mental health challenges with others.
KS: Brilliant. Thank you for your time. Students, keep a look out for the Health & Wellness Education’s Stressbusters Calendar out May 6th!
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer poses at the Research Desk, modeling audiobook use with sex columnist Dan Savage’s American Savage.
Audiobooks on OverDrive are digital versions of a book, often a novel, that allow you to listen to a book’s text. Many come in downloadable MP3 format files and are therefore portable on many electronic devices like iPods. Sometimes the authors read their works to you with modest sound effects or other dramatizations of the story or action! Audiobooks can also be found on CDs in the Middlebury College Libraries’ collection. See a thorough listing here.
Why might I want use them?
If it’s hard to find still moments to sit down and open a print work or scroll through an ebook, audiobooks offer a hands-free alternative to the other formats. So, you can carry out household chores, drive, or even exercise while listening to an audiobook.
In terms of what the Middlebury College Libraries holds on OverDrive, just visit go.middlebury.edu/overdrive for access to over 200 audiobooks. If you’re a Vermont resident and a holder of a public library card, you can access 5,000+ titles through the Green Mountain Library Consortium. See go.middlebury.edu/gmlc for more information and use your last name in all caps, ex. ALI, as your password.
Yes, sure! But that depends on what you like. One of my favorite parts of my job is readers’ advisory. Look at the bolded type for genre:
If you want a psychologicalthriller in the realm of domestic noir, I recommend The Silent Wife.
If dystopianfantasy is what you’re into, Director of Access and Discovery Terry Simpkins and Library Associate Kat Cyr swear by N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Series.
If you want to access a classic and haven’t gotten around to it, Things Fall Apart is available.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer lit? I really enjoyed Less. Dr. Marcos Rohena-Madrazo of the Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies is a big fan of Redefining Realness.
Historical fiction? Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Underground Railroad is recommendable.
And we have memoirs like Michelle Obama’s Becoming— though you may have to wait awhile to get to this one. See my review of it in The Campus, in the meanwhile.
Oh, and if you’re studying a foreign language like Spanish, you’ve got about 10 works to choose from on OverDrive and several on CDs in many languages found in the foreign language browsing collection on the main level of the Davis Family Library.
There’s a lot out there!
How can I use them and what should I know about the app?
There are three basic steps for accessing audiobooks:
A flyer with detailed instructions on how to use OverDrive’s audiobooks, a condensed version reproduced at left
Download the OverDrive app, create an original account and after signing in, add the Davis Family Library.
When prompted to sign in with a library card, accept, but use your Middlebury credentials instead.
Make a selection, borrow and manage your ebookshelf.
Also, when in doubt, you are welcome to ask a librarian for help or visit the guide found at go.middlebury.edu/ebookguide. With regard to the OverDrive app, there are some cool options like setting a timer for when you want the recording to stop playing, for example, if you’re getting in bed to sleep, and adjusting the speed of the player if you want to move through some text more quickly or more slowly than others. There’s some bookmarking, too.
There are two loan periods: 7 days and 14 days. Know that only one user will use each audiobook at a time. So, if desirable, you can place a hold on a work if you want to be in line for when a popular item is released. Check out up to three audiobooks at a time!
Last words?
They’ve changed my life, for the better. I hope they are of use to you, too. Also, to hear more from Middlebury audiobook users, see this week’s issue of The Campus.
You may be aware that we’ve had an access problem with the New York Times web site over the past few months. The short version of the issue is that SGA was providing online access until NYT discontinued that program…which no one on campus realized until our access ceased (there’s more detail in this Campus article). The Times’ new program is extremely expensive, and the library’s funding for this fiscal year was set last year. Partial access is still available; would that full access were, and we wish an immediate solution were at hand. We haven’t given up, though, and are still working on the problem. Please feel free to contact Douglas Black, Head of Collections Management, for more information.
Links to our remaining options for online access access to the NYT are in the Journals list New York Times. (You can get to this list on your own by clicking on the “Journals” tab on the library home page and searching for “new york times.”) For today’s paper, select “Global Newsstream,” a database that provides NYT articles with full text but without images. Need help? Ask a librarian.
ITS is aware of an influx of sextortion scam emails received by members of the Middlebury community. These are indeed scams, identified as such by online security sources (see below) and making the rounds on the Internet once again. Recent samples have been personalized with older passwords stolen from breaches of third-party websites, such as Linkedin, Adobe, etc..
Please forward any sextortion scam emails to phishing@middlebury.edu so that the sender addresses can be blocked!
For more information on these sorts of scams, see:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/sextortion-scam-uses-recipients-hacked-passwords/comment-page-13/ Excerpt: “The message purports to have been sent from a hacker who’s compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. The missive threatens to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom. The new twist? The email now references a real password previously tied to the recipient’s email address.”
These are indeed scams. Recent samples have been personalized with older passwords stolen from breaches of third-party websites, such as Linkedin, Adobe, etc..
Here is a resource to help you find out where an old password to a 3rd party site may have been exposed: https://haveibeenpwned.com is run by Troy Hunt, a globally recognized security expert.
Check your email address here: https://haveibeenpwned.com (use your_username@middlebury.edu and then scroll down to see services where your username may have been part of a breach)
Change that password anywhere you use it and this time, pick a different STRONG password for each service.
Again, please forward any sextortion scam emails to phishing@middlebury.edu so that the sender addresses can be blocked from bothering our community members!
Come Visit the 4th Annual Middlebury Write-In, Wednesday, December 5th, from 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. in Davis Family Library 201 or the Anderson Freeman Center.
On Wednesday, December 5th, from 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m., supported by the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR), the 4th Annual Middlebury Write-In will be held. Students can receive writing assistance from tutors and research help from librarians in Davis Family Library 201 or in the Anderson Freeman Center. Snacks will be served. For more information, visit go.middlebury.edu/writein.
You may be aware that we’ve had an access problem with the New York Times web site over the past few months. The short version of the issue is that SGA was providing online access until NYT discontinued that program…which no one on campus realized until our access ceased (there’s more detail in 
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