portal: Libraries and the Academy

abstract:

This paper sets out to identify the ways in which academic libraries can further interdisciplinary scholarship on campus. The medical humanities is presented as an example to interrogate the current practices in academic libraries and to inform future efforts in support of interdisciplinarity. Text mining was employed to illuminate trends in this interdisciplinary field using program descriptions from universities with “very high research activity” as a data set for analysis. Based on these data, this article proposes best practices and opportunities for engagement in the medical humanities that may be applicable to other interdisciplinary fields served by research libraries.