Have you ever been curious about what we do or what we have at RBSC? Join our weekly tour of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of British Columbia Library for an introduction to our space and our unique materials and collections. Tours are free and open to the general public, as well as the UBC community. No need to RSVP, just drop in to learn what RBSC is all about!

Every Wednesday at 11 a.m.
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 1st floor
1961 East Mall, UBC Vancouver campus

For more information, please contact Rare Books and Special Collections at (604) 822-2521 or rare.books@ubc.ca.

Due to the current and expected extreme weather conditions, the Rare Books and Special Collections reading room will be closed on Wednesday, January 15. Apologies for any inconvenience!

Check the RBSC website tomorrow for information about open hours on Thursday, January 16.

Visit feline and canine themed exhibits at multiple branches of the library throughout January and February.

UBC Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre will be closed on Thursday, January 9, 2020.

 

Photo courtesy: Pixabay

 

Emerging as a two-year pilot project in 2007/8 under the auspices of the University of British Columbia’s Library, cIRcle began and remains the University’s digital repository for scholarly research and teaching materials created by the UBC community, its partners and affiliates.

 

Ranking highly among its North American peers and nabbing 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd places over the years, cIRcle was bestowed with such honours by the Ranking Web of Repositories (an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab) under the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) – the largest public research body in Spain.

 

Travelling back in time to 2013, catch some memorable comments about cIRcle by two UBC professors, Dirk van Zyl from the Department of Mining Engineering and Dwayne Tannant from the School of Engineering plus those from past GSS cIRcle Open Scholar Award winners – Sam Bailey, Shona Robinson and Christian Brady.

 

Now fast-forward to 2014 to check out some cIRcle highlights about finding ‘a permanent home’ for the “Intellectual Muscle – The Talks” project sponsored by VANOC, UBC Continuing Studies and The Globe and Mail; archiving a case study funded by SSHRC that captures Vancouver’s 1914 history of cinemagoing and compares it with Winnipeg-Seattle and with Toronto-Montreal; and, preserving the Rheumatology Newsletters’ collection which features the “outreach pediatric services offered via traveling clinics throughout BC“ (two of the clinics founded by UBC graduates of the pediatric rheumatology training program – Dr. K. Gross in Penticton and Dr. R. Bolaria in Victoria).

 

Journeying on through to 2015, cIRcle received a DSpace software upgrade (from version 3.1 to 5.1); started ingesting the BioMedical Central (BMC) Reviewed UBC Faculty journal articles via the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol; welcomed and added several conference proceedings, webcasts and speaker slide presentations from the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering’s 5th International/11th Construction Specialty Conference (ISCS15), the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum 2015 (which made its historical debut in Canada that year), Open UBC 2015, The Seventh International Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EEDS15) and the 12th International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering (ICASP12) and more.

 

Moving along to 2016, cIRcle welcomed new 2015/16 papers and presentations from the British Columbia Mine Reclamation Symposia as well as the Investigating Our Practices and Workshop for Instruction in Library Use (WILU) conferences. Examples of the UBC community, its partners and affiliates who contributed new items to cIRcle that year included various UBC departments, institutes and schools – Educational Studies (EDST), Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, History, Nursing, Social Work, Audiology and Speech Sciences, Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Civil Engineering, Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), and the UBC Library. And last (but not least), the first undergraduate, peer- and faculty-reviewed sociology publication in North America, Sojourners, was welcomed in cIRcle!

 

Advancing on through to 2017, cIRcle was thrilled to archive the first round of UBC President Ono’s speeches and writings in 2017; a growth in items found in the UBC Faculty Research and Publications collection shows that it grew from 3,600 items in total for 2017 to 5,704 items in total as of today for 2019!

 

Traversing over into 2017-2018, cIRcle achieved another milestone of containing more than 60,000 items in the repository and saw an increase of its annual growth rate up from 8% in previous years to 10%. In 2018, an historical UBC milestone was attained when UBC President and Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Santa Ono, delivered a Statement of Apology on behalf of UBC concerning its role in the residential school system. Hundreds attended the live event that was held and recorded on April 9, 2018 at the long-awaited opening of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC).

 

Without cIRcle missing a beat in 2018-2019, some new and ongoing cIRcle partnerships included the Database of Religious History entries, Transnational Business Governance Interactions (TBGI) Working Papers, audio and video recordings of the Vancouver Institute Lectures, a mix of textual and other media content of the From the Ground Up: Buddhism & East Asian Religions, the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) Graduating Projects, and the UBC Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies’ Ziegler Series of video lecture recordings, to name just a few.

 

Today, it is a great pleasure to see that there are more than 69,700 items in cIRcle (and counting!). So, during this hectic time of year, take some time to sit and relax with a treasure trove of scholarly research and teaching materials on offer from cIRcle, UBC’s digital open access repository!

 

Featured cIRcle Projects:

Database of Religious History (DRH)

From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions (FROGBEAR) Project

Making Research Accessible Initiative (MRAi)

Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS)

Portage White Papers

Punjabi Oral History Project

School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) Graduating Projects

SEEDS Sustainability Program Reports

Three Minute Thesis (3MT)

Transnational Business Governance Interactions (TBGI) Working Papers)

World Sanskrit Conference (WSC) 2018

Read about the cIRcle Projects for more details

 

Browse cIRcle in the Library’s Open Collections portal

UBC Theses and Dissertations

Conferences & Events

Faculty Research and Publications

Graduate Research

Undergraduate Research

UBC Community and Partners

 

 

Visit the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on Wednesday, January 8th to meet John Fluevog.

The David Lam Management Research Library and Canaccord Learning Commons, Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC Library are delighted to host Vancouver shoe designer and international style icon John Fluevog for a meet and greet and book signing on Wednesday, January 8, from 12:30-2:00pm in the foyer of UBC Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, level 2.

Join us for this opportunity to welcome John home to Vancouver after a successful North American book tour, congratulate him on 50 years in the business, talk shoes, and ask him to sign your copy of Fluevog: 50 years of Unique Soles for Unique Souls. (Copies will also be available for purchase.)

You will also have a chance to visit UBC Library’s exhibition “50 Years of Sole: A History of Fluevog: Honouring a Vancouver Icon,” which highlights how John Fluevog has successfully built a business, a brand, and a community over the course of 50 years.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Rare Books and Special Collections at (604) 822-2521 or rare.books@ubc.ca.

 

 

Did you know that, in 1998, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) was founded by John Willinsky in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC)? Its aim was and still is today to “improv[e] the scholarly and public quality of research”.

UBC “support[s] scholarly pursuits that contribute to knowledge and understanding within and across disciplines and seek[s] every opportunity to share them broadly” as outlined in the From UBC’s Place and Promise Strategic Plan and echoed in the Library’s Strategic Framework. Discover why PKP is a critical platform in open scholarly communications infrastructure via Digital Programs and Services at UBC Library.

 

Read the Library’s full PKP blog post

 

Explore Open Journals Systems (OJS)

 

Find out more about Open UBC

 

 

As we head into final exams, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre will stay open longer to accommodate students and their study schedules. The Learning Centre will be open 24 hours a day from Monday, December 2 (opening at 6 a.m.) to Friday, December 13 (closing at 1 a.m.).

UBC Library hosts exhibit honouring Vancouver icon John Fluevog. The exhibit, located in the David Lam Management Research Library and Level 2 of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre runs until the end of the year.