Rick Johnson
Director, Strategic Innovation Lab
University of Notre Dame
John Wang
Associate University Librarian
University of Notre Dame
In late 2019, we forged a partnership between the Hesburgh Libraries, Notre Dame Research (aka the Office of Research), and 221B Consulting to create a system to improve the efficiency and accuracy of aggregating data across multiple sources for use by University leadership to evaluate impact of campus centers/institutes. Our goal was to create a consistent workflow that could be used across centers, provide high-confidence data that was both correct and authoritative, and reduce the time-consuming and error-prone effort required of center/institute personnel from weeks to a matter of days. With lessons learned from the presenters’ experiences leading the Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education (SHARE) project, the Strategic Innovation Lab in the Hesburgh Libraries and 221B built and piloted the PACE system that moves beyond typical author disambiguation towards assigning subsets of author publications to their campus Center(s)/Institute(s) at the University of Notre Dame. By programmatically harvesting and synthesizing data from a diverse set of sources coupled with leveraging human expertise within the libraries, the PACE human-in-the-loop process is receiving incredibly positive feedback from University stakeholders. We will provide a demonstration of the tool and component workflows, an overview of feedback from our recent campus pilot expansion, and ideas about how others could forge similar partnerships on campus, of which we are seeking feedback.