Recently the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office released its 2018/2019 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.

 

We are excited to share cIRcle’s Impact and Activity Report for 2019-2020!

2019-2020 was a year of milestones for cIRcle, UBC’s Research Repository. Early this spring, cIRcle celebrated passing the 70,000 open access item mark. This year also saw more than one million visitors to cIRcle content via the UBC Open Collections site.

cIRcle has continued to support faculty deposits, with more than 2,300 items added – an 8% increase from the previous year. Over the past five years, faculty content has grown from less than 10% of all annual deposits in cIRcle to nearly 50% of all new items.

Every year brings exciting new and continuing partnerships with UBC faculty, students, and our larger research community. Some new partners and projects from 2019-2020 include: the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, the World Sanskrit Conference, and the Punjabi Oral History Project. We also worked with the Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference to archive conference materials after the in-person conference was cancelled due to COVID-19.

Other highlights from this year include developing and testing enhancements for UBC’s Open Collections search and indexing platforms and collaborating with Artefactual to complete upgrades to Archivematica 1.9.2 and Storage Service 0.14.1, our open source digital preservation system. Over 53,000 Archival Information Packages are stored to date, with thousands more in the queue, ensuring long-term accessibility and usability of cIRcle content for future generations.

Dive into UBC research in cIRcle – from pre-prints and post-prints of journal articles to conference materials, departmental publications, technical reports, lectures, course notes, and much more.

Beginning September 8, 2020, UBC Library will provide bookable study space for students, faculty and staff in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre Monday through Saturday. This space will include access to desktop computers, printing and scanning and be organized to ensure safe physical distancing at all times. Study space must be reserved online. Masks are encouraged.

 

The Community Scholars Program (CSP) provides BC non-profits and charitable organizations with free access to academic journals and research related to their fields.

Many of the 170,000 non-profits and charitable organizations in Canada are doing critical work on social issues but most have little or no access to academic journals or research unless they are affiliated with a university. CSP provides BC organizations with access to more than 20,000 academic titles at no cost. In addition, the program provides research support, consultations with libraries, communities of practice through workshops and journal clubs.

UBC Library, through the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, joins SFU Library, Vancouver Island University, the University of Northern British Columbia and Thompson Rivers University as a Community Scholars partner to share involvement in the program with their non-profit networks. During UBC’s one year sponsorship (from June 2020 to May 2021) there will be limited placements available for qualifying organizations that are referred to the program by the UBC. If you have a UBC affiliation and would like to recommend an organization or for more information please contact Kristen Wong (kristen.wong@ubc.ca) or Aleha McCauley (aleha.mccauley@ubc.ca).

Nineteen projects have been selected as the successful recipients of the 2020 -2021 B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP) funding awards.

The digitization program, an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, was launched in 2006. It provides matching funds that help libraries, archives, museums and other organizations digitize unique historical items, including images, print and audio visual materials.

The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre funding totalled $160,000 for the 2020 – 2021 round. Altogether, the B.C. History Digitization Program has provided more than $1 million for more than 100 projects throughout British Columbia.

This year’s diverse range of projects include the digitization of several historical newspapers (Kelowna, Nelson, Oliver and Saanich), audio recordings from Pender Guy radio program, the Museum of Vancouver’s trades and businesses collection , a bilingual newspaper Patrika (English/Punjabi), as well as the Judith Marcuse Dance collection.

Please note, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some projects are deferring their start date until further notice.

Congratulations to this year’s recipients!

To view a complete listing of the projects and their descriptions:

BC History Digitization Program – 2020 Projects

Due to the quickly evolving situation with COVID-19, all UBC Library branches will remain closed until April 30, 2020 at which time the situation will be reassessed. This includes libraries at both the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

We’re still open! We are committed to helping our UBC community make their research openly available to the world via our digital repository, cIRcle. However, we will be reducing our response time for non-urgent requests to 7-10 business days as we transition to remote work. We will continue to review and deposit theses and dissertations as usual. For new requests, please review our Submissions page. 

As UBC transitions to online learning, you may also be interested in the guide to remote access to resources and services for UBC Library users.

Follow us on Twitter @cIRcle_UBC for updates on the latest additions to our repository and scholarly communications news.

 

Due to the quickly evolving situation with COVID-19, the Rare Books and Special Collections and University Archives reading room will be closed until further notice.

During this time librarians, archivists, and staff will be working remotely to continue to support patrons to the extent possible. Please see our Rare Books and Special Collections Remote Resources and Services Guide for more information and assistance.

Feel free to contact us through the RBSC contact form or by sending an email to rare.books@ubc.ca or to a specific librarian or archivist. Inquiries for University Archives can be sent through their contact form or direct email.

During our reading room closure, be sure to explore digitized materials from RBSC’s collections available through UBC Library’s Open Collections. RBSC’s LibGuides provide helpful links to digitized materials by subject matter or collection where available. There are also a number of digitized primary source materials available through UBC Library’s subscription databases.

Please check the UBC Library homepage and the Rare Books and Special Collections homepage for future updates about reading room operations.

Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Thank you for your understanding during these uncertain times and be well.

Did you know that UBC Library's Irving K. Barber Learning Center launched the Small Business Accelerator ten years ago in 2010? A lot has changed since then so we are inviting your feedback in a survey running most of March 2020. Do you live in Canada and use or refer people to sba.ubc.ca? If so, please share your opinions with us! Survey is open until March 25, 2020.

The Wild Ride: In and Out of Years and Over a Century of Picturebooks is a chronological look at the evolution of the picturebook, one of the important literary art forms to emerge from the 20th Century. This exhibit is on display in IKBLC on the Level 2 foyer from March 4 through May 30, 2020.