NCSU Libraries’ Jason Evans Groth a Library Journal “Mover & Shaker”

Library Journal has named NCSU Libraries User Experience Librarian for Digital Media Jason Evans Groth a 2016 “Mover & Shaker.” Cited as one of the library world’s “tech leaders,” Evans Groth is lauded for his innovative practices in bridging the gap between traditional scholarship and multimedia experiences.

While some involved with digital media might concentrate on the technology side of the work, Evans Groth balances tech with pedagogy to enhance teaching and learning. For “Shooting Wars: Documentary Images of American Military Conflicts,” a project about the relationship between war and media, Evans Groth worked with professor Marsha Gordon to develop media creation workshops for her graduate students and showcased content from the Libraries’ collection on the Hunt Library Game Lab’s 20-foot-wide interactive visualization wall. The class project was so successful that it has fundamentally changed Gordon’s approach to how she teaches film studies. The semester-long experience caused her to "think about how to use these spaces to create and disseminate knowledge in new ways and to talk to each other in ways that are maybe more open and more performative than I certainly have in my classes in the past...[j]ust think about the potential for this as the kind of project that can really give meaning to a 21st-century library and to a 21st-century classroom.”

With a background as a professional musician, Evans Groth brings a unique understanding of audience engagement into academic and research settings. He is recognized for his ability to bolster scholarship by deploying digital media, making information more interactive and impactful. Evans Groth hopes to promote the audio production services at the Libraries and to feature some of the musical talent on campus at NC State.

Annually since 2002, the trade publication Library Journal has chosen a class of innovative librarians and library staff members from an international pool of nearly 300 nominees. Evans Groth is NCSU Libraries’ ninth “Mover & Shaker” in eleven years.

This year’s “Movers & Shakers” class will be acknowledged at the American Library Association annual conference in Orlando, Florida on June 24.