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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of community service in academic librarianship in the USA and models for developing local community service programs that encourage participation from academic librarians.

After providing a review of literature related to academic librarianship and community service in the USA, a description of community service opportunities for librarians at Mississippi State University is presented. Suggestions are made regarding development of similar opportunities at other institutions.

Community service is an important element of academic librarianship, and the service opportunities available to Mississippi State University librarians offer a variety of long‐ and short‐term projects that allow for active participation.

It is hoped that this case study – dealing with community service opportunities for academic librarians – will be used as a model by other librarians who wish to develop service options in their own communities.

Using a systems‐based approach to creativity and a sociocultural constructionist approach to learning, this study aims to highlight how creative ideas emerge within a community and spread amongst its members.

Using a design‐based approach to research, this study took place within the social media environment, Quest Atlantis. Chat data were collected from 85 participants and screenshots were taken of the virtual architecture designed and built by players in the Quest Atlantis environment, in an effort to explore the nature of creativity and collaborative learning within the context of virtual 3D architectural construction.

The findings illustrate the rise and spread of creativity in online communities and also point to the social and cultural nature of creativity.

This study, the first of its kind, focuses on how creativity operates within a single community in order to draw implications about digital creativity more broadly.

Implications for designing virtual and physical communities to promote creativity are discussed.

Documenting and analyzing an entire creative system in the everyday world can be a challenging endeavor. Social media, by contrast, offer an opportunity to document, describe, and analyze creativity, extend Csikszentmihalyi's work into the realm of social media and push back on current conceptions of digital creativity.