I attended the recent LOEX conference in San Diego about a month ago, and I’m just now getting around to blogging about it. There were quite a few sessions discussing libraries using “civic engagement” as a means of improving the information literacy skills of their patrons. In a nutshell -> get people interested in becoming active members of a community by showing them that their direct input will be taken into account by policy makers and you create a seed for lifelong information literacy skills.
At Carnegie Mellon we’re doing this with deliberative polling. I’ve been involved with this for one poll, but until the LOEX conference I hadn’t made the mental connections necessary to become convinced of its usefulness to libraries.
If you’ve read my other posts or spoken to me about information literacy I hope my marketing ideas came across clearly. In short: in addition to working at traditional informaiton literacy education and integrating information literacy standards into curicula, libraries are in a unique position to market themselves to faculty, administrators, teachers, policy makers, council members, and patrons etc. as the ‘human’ resource in making the world a less ignorant place. Libraries know how to research an issue and excel at teaching people those skills. Promoting civic engagement, whether through researching documents for deliberative polling or providing hosting space for town hall meetings is a promising means of promoting libraries and fostering information literacy in patron constituencies.
