Christina Leblang
Project Manager
University of Notre Dame
Zheng (John) Wang
Associate University Librarian
University of Notre Dame
As universities emphasize the importance of cross-disciplinary research, traditional library discovery and knowledge management systems struggle to expose the connections across disciplines adequately. Because the nature of subject heading creation is to summarize concepts into precise, standardized words, traditional bibliographic classification schemas are unable to comprehensively capture all of the concepts and meanings that can be derived from texts. Combined with the practice of using different standardized vocabularies (disciplinary jargons), subject headings lack adequate semantic linking across different scholarly domains which makes discovery and use of library collections challenging for scholars trying to perform cross-disciplinary research. 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. The presentation will provide a detailed narrative about the quest of minting cross-disciplinary studies, their challenges, learnings, experiences, as well as librarians’ and scholars’ respective roles in multidisciplinary research. The session will also demonstrate new features of Convocate. Finally, a plan will 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. Convocate starts to present an opportunity to transform library paper-based knowledge systems to one that is scalable and sustainable in the current digital environment and to revitalize the perception of libraries as collaborators in scholarly research.