Among many, public libraries are assumed to be the focal points for libraries in a community. Brian Mathews, Associate Dean at Virginia Tech Libraries, recently published an article arguing that academic libraries can engage with their communities too.

In the article, he talks about libraries becoming the “Engines for Change.” Rather than passive community participants, he wants us to engage with our community, truly inspiring and helping them towards social change and awareness. He fills his paper with many examples he has seen at Virginia Tech and elsewhere.

You can read his entire paper here: http://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/50827

Note: the Engines for Change paper by Brian Mathews has a Creative Commons license of BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. If you attended CMLE’s recent Copyright event, you’ll remember Creative Commons was discussed there. For others, you can learn about Creative Commons from a recent CMLE blog post.

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/lw5wdxj, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0