Collaboration between Libraries and Academic Units in Advancing Multidisciplinary Scholarship, Christina Leblang & Zheng (John) Wang (University of Notre Dame)

The University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Libraries in partnership with the Notre Dame Center for Civil and Human Rights (CCHR), have created a research tool called Convocate to demonstrate the possibilities of cross-disciplinary discovery. Convocate brings together the fields of international human rights law and Catholic social teaching into a single discovery interface. With the aide of topic modeling, Convocate can return over 11,000 paragraphs tagged against a list of 250 topics and help users bridge the gap between the use of different terms that are related to the same concept and thus discover more robust search results. This video provides an accounting of the challenges faced in minting cross-disciplinary studies, as well as a consideration of librarians’ and scholars’ respective roles in multidisciplinary research. Also included is discussion of the plan to extend the work on Convocate to create a more general application that will allow scholars in other disciplines to apply various neuro-linguistic programming and machine learning methods to their texts, elucidating new insights, and training the engine to create more meaningful connections across disciplines more precisely over time. 

Integration of Information Technology in a Building that Marries Library and Classroom: Purdue’s Wilmeth Active Learning Center, James L. Mullins (Purdue U.)

-Developing the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem: A CMU Perspective, David Scherer, Ole Villadsen, Keith Webster (Carnegie Mellon University)

-Closing plenary Herbert Van de Sompel: Scholarly Communication: Deconstruct & Decentralize?