After a summer & early fall hiatus, Service-Learning Librarian is back with a guest post from Dr. Julianne Gassman: Director, Office of Community Engagement and Professor, Recreation, Tourism & Nonprofit Leadership at University of Northern Iowa. We hope you appreciate Julianne's take on how to ensure our institutions center the community part of community engagement, with support from service-learning librarians.

Today's post is by Nicole Branch, Associate University Librarian for Learning and Engagement at Santa Clara University and Andrea Brewster, Assessment Manager, Undergraduate Studies at Santa Clara University. It describes research they conducted with Jennifer Nutefall, formerly of Santa Clara University and currently Dean of University Libraries at University of Northern Colorado.

Thanks to Jennifer Nutefall, I was recently made aware of this online professional development opportunity hosted by Infopeople, “Community and Civic Engagement: The Library’s Role as Connector.”  It sounds like a great opportunity.

A few weeks ago, Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen and a few other civic-related books, visited Wright State.  Since I have taken so long to write about his visit, I think a bulleted list of takeaways will be best.

Yesterday afternoon, Harry C.

I recently attended a workshop about how we can deepen students' reflections, which was led by one of Wright State's experienced service-learning instructors, Karen Hayes.  I came away with a new reflection question to include in my arsenal.  In fact, I love this question so much that it may never be removed from my arsenal.  The question was posed by my colleague, Stephanie Dickey, in our small group discussion during the workshop.  She suggested that we should challenge students to think about their role in relation to the problem or issue addressed by any service-learning course. 

A few WSU service-learning (and non-SL) courses this fall are themed around November's election.  As such, one of my colleagues put together this very informative guide:  http://guides.libraries.wright.edu/election2012 I also discovered today a few other resources that other librarians may be interested in: You can order free posters (or download PDFs) to encourage voting at this web site:  http://www.nonprofitvote.org/endorse-votin

Let me begin this guest post with a short introduction.  My name is Chris Sweet and I am the Information Literacy Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University (Central Illinois). I had been following Maureen's blog as well as her publications for some time prior to meeting her in-person at this year's LOEX Conference in Columbus, OH. Both of us have discovered a real passion for service-learning and have seen first-hand how adding information literacy elements to service-learning courses can create even stronger and more effective classes.

This morning, I read an article posted in the online American Libraries, called Community Reference:  Making libraries indispensible in a new way by Colbe Galston, Elizabeth Kelsen Huber, Katherine Johnson, and Amy Long.  It reminded me a lot of why I chose to explore service-learning as an option for my information literacy course 5 years ago.  They highlight many of the same concepts in their endeavors to get out into the community that are vital to a successful academic service-learning relationships.  The authors stress the importance of working as a partner,

Campus Compact's annual member survey summarizing 2011 was recently released.  The report offers a great portrait of the landscape of civic and community engagement in higher education institutions throughout the country.