Defining community

I would like to see the library be more intentional about fostering community on campus and so I've started to think about what that means.

When I think of community at college, I think about staying up late in dorm rooms engaged in conversations that constantly rambled back and forth from academic to non-academic topics. For me at least these conversations were not only enjoyable but an important part of internalizing and working through the new material I was reading and learning in class. So important in fact that it is hard for me to imagine college without this type of community.

In trying to move beyond anecdotal experience to a more generalized definition of campus community, I discovered the report Campus Life: In Search of Community issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1990). This report lists 6 principles that "Define the kind of community every college and university should strive to be." (p.7) They are:

1. Educationally purposeful
2. Open - freedom of expression protected and greeted with civility
3. Just - each person treated with dignity
4. Disciplined - people accept responsibility and work for the common good
5. Caring
6. Celebrative - rituals affirm both tradition and change

I think that these principles capture much of what I appreciated about the informal community I described above. In future posts I hope to look at how libraries, and especially libraries' web presence may foster this type of community but I'm curious would you add to this list of principles or qualify any of them?

Online community (part 1)

I was talking about online community the other day and how the library might foster it when I was asked what I meant by the word "community." I think it is a fair question and so I've started to think some about just what do we mean by online community and why should a library be involved in creating or building it.

Since I'm only starting to think about this, I'd love to hear your ideas or citations of helpful resources. Please post them in the comments.

The OED has its usual plethora of suggestions including, fellowship, communion; life in association with others. I've also begun to think of examples of community that might be helpful in this context. One example is sitting around a dorm room with fellow students discussing, laughing, and questioning what we are studying - this seems to me a learning community in action. Another positive example is meeting a professor over lunch and talking about classes and their connection to life. Should we try to replicate these kind of experiences online? What other, perhaps unique expressions of learning communities might exist online?