The Campus Compact conference in Indianapolis is winding down today. It’s been so encouraging to hear about all the projects to involve students in civic and community engagement. The session my colleagues Jennifer Nutefall, Amanda Peters, Megan Stark and I presented — Inspired by Real Events: Libraries transforming students into engaged citizens was well attended. Perhaps most encouraging was the response from community engagement folks who were encouraged to go back to their campuses and start conversations with their librarians. A few people even said they hoped to be able to attend the upcoming Colloquium on Libraries & Service Learning in Washington DC in August with their library colleagues!

It was also encouraging to hear people say they thought the rubric we’ve been developing would be a useful tool for librarians engaging with service learning professionals and vice versa. The rubric is published here, and we also hope to publish it more widely with a Creative Commons License so people can be free to modify and publish their own versions of it.

Despite the weather in Indianapolis (snow, then rain) it’s been great to be here.