The concept of civic literacy was brought to my attention this morning by my friend and fellow service-learning enthusiast, Jennifer Nutefall.  Perhaps I've been living under a rock.  I've heard dozens of kinds of literacy in recent years (digital literacy, media literacy, transliteracy, financial literacy, etc), but I haven't spent any time looking into civic literacy.  Jennifer forwarded me papers and proceedings from a recent IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) conference: http://www.lnb.lv/iflariga2012/p

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, building relations