Libraries and Civic Engagement: A Personal Reflection.

This article reports that civic values are defined as those beliefs, ideas, and feelings concerning students' communities and their country that most Americans hold in common: connectedness to home, school, place of worship, friends, and neighbors on the local level, and, nationally, love of country, pride in the history, and confidence about the future. In order to be used at all, libraries require that their patrons follow a set of rules and behavior that forces them to pay attention to their surroundings and to other people. Libraries are places where order, thinking, attention to detail, caring for the individual, and noticing one another are the rule, not the exception. Libraries also provide a clean, well-lighted place, a haven from chaos, and a promise of better things for those whose homes and families are not stable. Libraries, however, and the values they enshrine, are universal in nature. No matter the country the values at the heart of every library encourage and even demand that users take individual initiative to find answers to the questions they bring with them.