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Montana State University Library (MSU Library) is the academic library of Montana State University, Montana's land-grant university, in Bozeman, Montana, United States. It is the flagship library for all of Montana State University System's campuses. In 1978, the library was named the Roland R. Renne Library to honor the sixth president of the university. The library supports the research and information needs of Montana's students, faculty, and the Montana Extension Service.
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Item Toward A Contemplative Technopedagogy Framework: A Discourse Analysis(2020-09) Shanks, Justin D.Digital technology features prominently in the higher education ecosystem, affecting the ways in which educators think, communicate, and teach. This research applies discourse analysis to articles published within The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) to understand: (1) The ways in which conceptions of digital technology in higher education pedagogy have changed and the ways in which they have remained consistent from 1993 to 2016 and (2) The extent to which CHE articles addressed attributes of contemplation with regard to technopedagogy. Research findings indicate that during the previous 23 years digital technology was portrayed as an overwhelmingly positive addition to higher education pedagogy. Less than half of articles analyzed contained attributes of contemplation. Non-contemplative technopedagogical approaches can lead to uncritical adoption or knee-jerk dismissal of digital technology – either of which can have substantial and long-lasting consequences within teaching-learning environments. Contemporary pedagogies need to pay closer attention to digital technologies, but must do so in a purposeful and engaged manner. This historical and discursive research inductively led to the development of the Contemplative Technopedagogy Framework, which provides an approachable introduction to using attributes of contemplation when making pedagogical decisions about digital technology in higher education.Item Radical Collaboration: Making the Computational Turn in Special Collections and Archives(2019-11) Shanks, Justin D.; Mannheimer, Sara; Clark, Jason A.As more archival collections are digitized or born-digital, the work of archivists increasingly overlaps with the work of librarians who are responsible for research data and digital scholarship. This editorial uses Nancy McGovern's idea of radical collaboration as a framework, presenting a case study from Montana State University Library in which we collaborated across the domains of research data management, digital scholarship, archives, and special collections to integrate computational approaches into research, teaching, and service aspects of digital archival collections.Item Applying Attributes of Contemplative Technopedagogy to a Social Media Assignment(2019-06) Shanks, Justin D.; Young, Scott W. H.With widespread prevalence of digital technology in contemporary higher education, researchers have been keen to identify best practices and understand impacts. Social media present opportunities to cultivate interactive, creative teaching-learning communities. However, inclusion of social media in a course does not necessarily equal deep or creative student engagement. Faculty play an important role in helping students critically and creatively engage with content, colleagues, and context. Utilizing a mixed-methods case study approach, this research explores how contemplative technopedagogy can aid in the development of social media assignments and positively influence student learning. While blogging has been studied as a pedagogical tool, Tumblr has not yet been studied as an educational technology. This research demonstrates how the integration of contemplative technopedagogical attributes can aid faculty in developing social media assignments with contextual awareness that enhance teaching and learning in contemporary higher education.Item Data-Driven Improvement to Institutional Repository Discoverability and Use(Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2018-09) Arlitsch, Kenning; Kahanda, Indika; OBrien, Patrick; Shanks, Justin D.; Wheeler, JonathanThe Montana State University (MSU) Library, in partnership with the MSU School of Computing, the University of New Mexico Library and DuraSpace, seeks a $49,998 Planning Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through its National Leadership Grant program under its National Digital Platform project category to develop a sustainability plan for the Repositories Analytics & Metrics Portal that will keep its dataset open and available to all researchers. The proposal also includes developing a preliminary institutional repositories (IR) reporting model; a search engine optimization (SEO) audit and remediation plan for IR; and exploring whether machine learning can improve the quality of IR content metadata.The project team expects work conducted in this planning grant to make the case for advanced research projects that will be high-impact and worthy of funding.Item Service Blueprinting: A Method for Assessing Library Technologies within an Interconnected Service Ecosystem(Taylor & Francis, 2019-06) Young, Scott W. H.; Mannheimer, Sara; Rossmann, Doralyn; Swedman, David; Shanks, Justin D.Service blueprinting is a method for designing, assessing, and improving services. This article provides a practical overview of the service blueprinting process for library technology services. We begin by outlining the recent conversation around library technologies, service design, and service blueprinting. We then detail an iterative case study for the creation process of a service blueprint, followed by a discussion of the service insights and improvements that resulted from this activity. We conclude by offering a set of recommendations for creating and analyzing service blueprints. Ultimately, the service blueprint is a useful tool for understanding the operation of a service, and for situating that service within a broader and interconnected library ecosystem.Item Assessing and Improving Library Technology with Service Blueprinting(2018-07) Young, Scott W. H.; Mannheimer, Sara; Rossmann, Doralyn; Swedman, David; Shanks, Justin D.Objective: The objective of this article is to illustrate the application of service blueprinting—a design tool that comes from the service design tradition—for assessing and improving library technology services. Setting: A mid-sized library at a public university in the western United States. Methods: A service blueprint was co-created by library and IT staff in a design workshop in order to map the operational flow of a data visualization display wall. Results: Guided by the service blueprint, the project team identified points of improvement for the service of the data visualization display wall, and developed recommendations to aid further applications of service blueprinting. Conclusions: Ultimately, service blueprinting was found to be a useful tool that can be applied to assess and improve library technology services.Item Teaching Undergraduate Students to Visualize and Communicate Public Health Data with Infographics(2017-11) Shanks, Justin D.; Izumi, Betty; Sun, Christina; Martin, Allea; Byker Shanks, CarmenThe purpose of this study was to explore the degree to which an infographic assignment facilitated student learning around health science issues, as well as the ways in which the assignment was an effective teaching tool. The objectives of the assignment were to (1) understand the purposes of and potential uses for infographics, (2) cultivate creative visual communication skills, and (3) disseminate a complex health topic to diverse audiences. The infographic assignment was developed at Montana State University and piloted at Portland State University. Students were assigned to small groups of three or four to create an infographic focused on a health science issue. The assignment was divided into four steps: brainstorming, developing, designing, and finalizing. Focus groups were conducted to assess how learning occurred throughout the assignment and identify any opportunities for modification of the assignment. This study was conducted with freshman students enrolled at Portland State University, a public university located in downtown Portland, OR, USA. Thirty four students completed the assignment and 31 students participated in one of three focus groups. Four themes emerged from focus groups: (1) Communicating Science-Related Topics to Non-experts, (2) Developing Professional Skills, (3) Understanding Health Issues, and (4) Overall Experience. This article outlines the assignment, discusses focus group results, and presents assignment modifications. It is clear that the infographic assignment facilitated learning about accessing and translating data. This assignment is ideally suited for use with diverse college-age audiences in health education and health promotion fields.Item Wikipedia and Wikidata Help Search Engines Understand Your Organization: Using Semantic Web Identity to Improve Recognition and Drive Traffic(ALA Editions, the American Library Association, 2018) Arlitsch, Kenning; Shanks, Justin D.Semantic Web Identity (SWI) is the condition in which search engines formally recognize entities and their relationships. Entities can be people, places, organizations, landmarks, or other “things” but in this chapter, entities will be defined as academic organizations: libraries, but also other academic units such as colleges, departments, centers, and institutes. An entity can be said to have achieved SWI if a formal display known as a Knowledge Graph Card (KC) appears for it in search engine results pages (SERP). The KC offers information about the entity directly in the search engine window, including such elements as address, phone number, hours of operation, description, link to the website, user reviews, etc. More importantly, the KC is an indicator that the search engine has achieved a machine-based comprehension of the existence and nature of the entity. With this understanding, the search engine can be more precise in its referrals and can hand off information about the entity to other semantic technologies. Far from being an end in itself, the display of an accurate and robust KC should simply be considered a positive indicator of SWI. Unfortunately, most academic organizations have not achieved SWI at this time. A search engine displays a KC when it has gathered enough verifiable facts about an entity. Search engines gather some facts organically while indexing website documents. But verifiable facts are more likely to be harvested from proprietary knowledge bases such as Google My Business, and from knowledge bases on the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, such as Wikipedia and Wikidata. Academic organizations have the best chance of controlling their SWI by proactively creating and curating records in these knowledge bases. This chapter will: (1) explain the significance of SWI; (2) describe a new library service developed at Montana State University that helps campus organizations implement SWI; and (3) demonstrate how SWI was successfully achieved in three case studies.Item Infographic Assignment for the Health Sciences(2017) Shanks, Justin D.; Izumi, Betty; Sun, Christina; Martin, Allea; Byker Shanks, CarmenThe infographic assignment was developed and pilot tested in summer 2016 and revised and retested in fall 2016. Students create an infographic focused on a health issue. The assignment objectives are to (1) understand the purposes of and potential uses for infographics, (2) cultivate creative visual communication skills, and (3) disseminate information about a complex health topic to diverse audiences. The assignment is divided into four steps: (1) brainstorming, (2) developing, (3) designing, and (4) finalizing. In the brainstorming step, students familiarize themselves with the infographic genre, selected a topic, used research skills to identify professional sources of information about their topic, and began drawing their infographic. In the developing step, students use software to develop their infographic. In the designing step, students select fonts and colors for their infographic. As part of the finalizing step, students market test their infographic with friends, family, peers, and faculty.Item Montana State University (MSU) Library Social Media Survey(2015-12) Young, Scott W. H.; Rossmann, Doralyn; Shanks, Justin D.This survey is designed to produce demographic and usage data for a community of social media users.