In celebration of open access and its global impact for over a decade, UBC and SFU will be participating in the 2018 International Open Access Week event during October 22-28, 2018.

 

Throughout UBC’s 2018 Open Access Week event, scholars will showcase and discuss their innovative research, teaching and learning skills and experiences while inspiring others to learn more and get involved with the global open access movement. These events will highlight the various opportunities and pathways enabling open scholarship for researchers at UBC and beyond.

 

Similar to past UBC Open Access Week events, this year will include free lectures, workshops, a panel discussion with a Q&A session, seminars, and symposia for students, faculty, staff, and the general public. Topical and timely issues will include the following ones to list just a few:

 

• new challenges faced by practitioners and stakeholders
• developing a scholarly/publishing profile
• applying Creative Commons licenses to your work
• navigating the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy (NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR)
• discovering Open Educational Resources (OER)

 

Visit Open UBC to register and attend these free events

 

Learn more about Open Access at UBC

 

 

Join us in looking back at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre's past 10 years from August 27 through October 30, 2018 in the IKBLC Level 2 foyer and in Rare Books and Special Collections.

Applications are being accepted until October 14.

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.

 

 

It is a pleasure to announce the release of cIRcle, UBC’s Research Repository Impact and Activity Report for 2017-2018!

 

In 2017-2018, cIRcle reached another milestone of over 60,000 items and saw an increase of its annual growth rate from 8% in previous years to 10%.

 

This report highlights’ include a sampling of cIRcle’s new and ongoing partnerships, its growth and development along with a snapshot of its top content contributors.

 

Two spotlights of cIRcle projects and collections included in the report are the BioMed Central/SpringerOpen project and the noteworthy additions in the UBC President’s Speeches and Writing collection.

 

Explore UBC research in cIRcle, for example, the growing number of preprints and postprints of academic journal articles, conference proceedings, departmental publications, technical reports, course notes, and much more.

 

 

 

 

Recently the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office released its 2017/2018 Impact and Activity Report, showcasing some of the year’s highlights and accomplishments.

For more information, or to share feedback please contact scholarly.communications@ubc.ca

Read the Report.

Knowledge Unlatched, a prominent publisher of Open Access monographs, recently announced the achievement of an important milestone – Over 950 open access titles from the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have been accessed more than 1 million times by users worldwide in the past 8 months of this year alone. This achievement represents a significant increase in downloads over the previous year.

UBC Library is a proud supporter of Knowledge Unlatched, and, along with over 500 other libraries worldwide, helps make academic monographs openly accessible online, for free. This partnership demonstrates the Library’s commitment to open access and providing academic materials to as wide an audience as possible.

Many thanks to guest blogger Claire Williams for contributing the below post! Claire is a graduate student at UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and has worked on processing labour history-related archival materials at RBSC.

As another September rolls around, and we take the first Monday off to celebrate Labour Day, we wanted to highlight some of the primary sources we have at RBSC that document the struggles won by the labour movement.

A Brief History of Labour Day

Labour Day in Canada has its origins in a struggle that originated over a century ago. In the late 1800’s, industrial workers in North America demanded humane working conditions, including a nine-hour workday. The Toronto Typographical Union went on strike in support of these demands, and many of the leaders of the strike were subsequently arrested. Following a public outcry, including large protests of the unfair treatment of the workers, parliament passed the Trade Unions Act, legalizing union activity and the legal right to strike. The legacy of this struggle led to the declaration of Labour Day as a national holiday. So began a tradition of recognizing the power of individuals who were willing to fight for the rights of the working class. While these struggles resulted in major legal and policy changes, they also came at a high cost to some workers who faced legal punitive action, loss of employment, arrest, and on occasion, physical violence.

Exploring Records of the Labour Movement

Here at Rare Books and Special Collections, we hold a wealth of primary sources related to labour history. I work at RBSC as a student archivist, where it is my job to arrange and describe these records in order to provide for their long-term preservation and access. One of the fonds I worked on was the Jean Sheils Research Collection. Sheils’ father, Arthur “Slim” Evans, had been a leading member of the On-to-Ottawa trek in 1935. During the trek over 1,000 unemployed men rode the trains from Vancouver to Ottawa in order to appear before the federal government and request better working conditions in the labour relief camps. The trek ended in Regina on 1 July 1935 when a riot broke out between the trekkers, their supporters, and the RCMP and local police.

 

For a guide to more labour related material at RBSC, see our research guide on the topic, located at http://guides.library.ubc.ca/labourhistoryarchives. To view this and other material in person, please come down to the RBSC reading room located in the basement of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

 

 

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

 

In the News: Locally, Nationally, and Internationally

 

Knowledge Unlatched books now discoverable within PaperHive Search

http://knowledgeunlatched.org/2018/07/paperhive-collection/

 

Recent documents digitized through the DigiLab at Library and Archives Canada

https://thediscoverblog.com/2018/07/19/recent-documents-digitized-through-the-digilab-2/

 

Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) takes a stand against language-based pricing

https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/index.php/en/crkn-stands-against-language-based-pricing-recent-negotiation

 

A visit to the CBC archives, on the eve of destruction

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-15-million-digitization-project-for-cbc-archives-upsets-some-critics/

 

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) releases full conference program

https://oaspa.org/full-program-announced-for-the-10th-conference-on-open-access-scholarly-publishing-17-19th-september-2018/

 

Libraries are about much more than books – and they always have been

http://www.ilovelibraries.org/article/libraries-are-about-much-more-books-%E2%80%93-and-they-always-have-been

 

Starting an Open Science Community at your university? Check out this guide

https://docs.google.com/document/d/112B-OCArTI-zdDZ6S67BPVHSn6gPL9GgmluoQ35zG40/edit

 

Sloan Foundation funds Frictionless Data for reproducible research

http://blog.okfn.org/2018/07/12/sloan-foundation-funds-frictionless-data-for-reproducible-research/

 

 

Sandboxing and Researching with BCcampus plus 20 years of Edtech

 

Automating accessibility: A BCcampus sandbox pilot project

https://bccampus.ca/2018/06/26/automating-accessibility-a-bccampus-sandbox-pilot-project/

 

Want to be a BCcampus Researcher, Open Practices? Apply now

https://bccampus.ca/careers/researcher-open-practices/

 

Twenty years of Edtech

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/7/twenty-years-of-edtech

 

 

UBC Wiki, Wikimedia, and Wikidata

 

UBC Wiki was upgraded on 16 July 2018 and made it easier for users to search Wikimedia Commons

https://wiki.ubc.ca/UBC_Wiki:UBC_Wiki_Upgrade

 

Wikimedia Foundation and Kiwix Partner to grow offline access to Wikipedia

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/07/18/wikimedia-foundation-and-kiwix-partner-to-grow-offline-access-to-wikipedia/

 

Wikidata has now indexed over 70 Million Citations

https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/

 

 

Open in… Incentives, Promotion, and Tenure

 

University of British Columbia is recognizing “Open” when in comes to promotion and tenure

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2018/7/university-of-british-columbia-recognizing-open-in-promotion-and-tenure

 

SPARC Europe embarks on new research project around funders and “Open” incentives and reward systems

https://sparceurope.org/sparc-europe-embarks-on-new-research-project-around-funders-and-open-incentives-and-reward-systems/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last year, UBC Library joined its partners (SFU, BCIT, KPU and Douglas College) in organizing a series of free events for Science Literacy Week and created a Library Guide to Science Literacy Week too. In previous years, UBC Library celebrated Science Literacy Week along with 140+ organizations across Canada and hosted a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a Science Expo, and a Living Library of graduate students who could be “borrowed” like books to talk about their inspiring research, and more.

In anticipation of Science Literacy Week happening 17-23 September 2018, you can also enjoy listening to a round of Frequencies podcasts including transcripts (courtesy of the UBC Okanagan Library) recorded at last year’s Science Literary Week event. This unique series is one that “explores the connections between science and society: the implications of scientific research on our culture, how scientists communicate their ideas, and how our society responds”.

Also, stay tuned for the soon-to-be-released “Science Literacy Week: Building Partnerships through a Passion for Discovery” (a conference paper co-authored by UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan librarians) arriving in cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository via UBC Library’s Open Collections portal.

 

Learn more about cIRcle