With the congregation ceremonies in full swing, it is an exciting time of year for UBC graduates, their families and fellow UBC colleagues along with the UBC community and other well-wishers.

A few congregation facts include:

@ In 1916, there were 41 graduates at UBC’s first Congregation ceremony held at the Hotel Vancouver

@ From 1919 to 1923, the first degrees were conferred in Agriculture, Applied Science in Nursing, and Forestry

@ Currently, there are 12 UBC faculties issuing degrees: Applied Science, Arts, Commerce and Business Administration, Dentistry, Education, Forestry, Graduate Studies, Land and Food Systems, Law, Medicine, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Science.

@ You can view UBC Congregation Ceremonies online at: http://www.graduation.ubc.ca/ubc-vancouver/live-webcast/

So, take a few minutes to celebrate some of UBC’s graduate students’ scholarly research and intellectual output – from across a variety of disciplines – via cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository.

Did You Know?

To date, there are almost 60 community and regional planning projects in the SCARP Graduating Projects collection in cIRcle. The projects cover many topics such as capacity building, healthy cities, participatory governance, primary schooling, transit planning, urban design, and more.

Above partial excerpt in italics and image are courtesy of the Graduation at UBC website

Would you like to have your academic work searched by Google Scholar or have your work archived in the UBC Library?

Be sure to check out the next cIRcle information session as part of the UBC Graduate & Undergraduate Student Workshop Series‘ events offered by UBC Library. The next cIRcle workshop is happening tomorrow at 3pm in Scarfe 155  which is located inside the Education Library (Neville Scarfe Building).

You will learn about cIRcle, what it contains, how you can contribute and what permissions are required to submit your presentations, articles and reports. This session will be facilitated by Jo-Anne Naslund.

To register, please click here.

Above image courtesy of: Flickr: UBC Library’s Photostream

Open Access Week @ UBC 2011 will be happening at UBC on October 24-30, 2011!

Open UBC is held in conjunction with International Open Access Week, which encourages the academic community to come together to share and learn about open scholarship initiatives locally and worldwide.

Open UBC showcases a week of diverse events highlighting areas of open scholarship that UBC’s researchers, faculty, students and staff participate in. These events include discussion forums, lectures, seminars, workshops, and symposia on topical and timely issues from every discipline. We invite everyone to participate either by organizing events, highlighting events already coinciding with the Week, or attending the events to be scheduled.

All of these events are FREE and open to the public, students, faculty, staff and schools.

With an open “Call for Participation”, this is your opportunity to get involved and share your scholarly research and/or tools with fellow UBC researchers, faculty, students, staff and the public.

Did You Know?

Previous Open Access Week @ UBC event presentations are archived in cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository. A variety of topics included open research data, scholarly rights and responsibilities, open source software, and open access journal publishing. Browse these topics and more within the Library Events collection in cIRcle.

Above image and excerpt in italics are courtesy of the Scholarly Communications @UBC website

One of the honourable mention submissions for the UBC Library’s 2011 Innovative Dissemination of Research Award competition is now available in cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository!

Some quick facts about this community-based collaborative research project include:

• Raises awareness about pesticide safety in BC’s Lower Mainland farming communities
• Demonstrates how to safely launder pesticide-contaminated clothing via Public Service Announcement (PSA) videos
• Features specially-choreographed bhangra dance and well-known Punjabi actors to disseminate the Wash With Care Project message
• Includes text-based resources (in English and Punjabi) for laundry instructions
• Research team are researchers from Simon Fraser University, the University of the Fraser Valley, and the University of British Columbia

To view the Wash With Care Project videos, be sure to check out these resources in cIRcle at:

Wash With Care: Laundry Instructions

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33873

Wash With Care: Public Service Announcement

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33872

To learn more about the UBC Library Innovative Dissemination of Research Award, visit the Scholarly Communications @ UBC website at: http://scholcomm.ubc.ca/events-awards/award/

Above image and partial excerpt are courtesy of the Wash With Care Project website

In case you missed it, Eugene Barsky won the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE, Engineering Libraries Division) Award last week. The certificate will be awarded in June at the ASEE Conference and Exposition.

As one of the Science & Engineering Librarians at UBC Library, Eugene spearheaded the collaboration between UBC Library and the British Columbia Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation. The objective? To digitize and make openly available over 30 years of mine reclamation information.

This digitization project provides free, open access to more than 600 BC Mining Reclamation symposia proceedings – covering mines from around the globe, including Canada – hosted on cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository.

Did You Know?

The British Columbia Mine Reclamation Symposium proceedings were featured in the Northern Miner newspaper and on the UBC Library News blog. This collection has been viewed and downloaded hundreds of times, mainly by users in the U.S. and Canada, but also by those from the U.K., Portugal, China, India, Finland and Norway.

Above image is courtesy of PABC Physio Info-blog

Recently, Chris Hives (University Archivist at the University of British Columbia) was “pleased to report that the Retrospective Theses collection in cIRcle [UBC’s Digital Repository] now includes full text copies of essentially all theses written at UBC between 1973 and 2007. This represents over 25,500 titles and approximately 4.24 million digitized pages.” As the final phase of this historical project gets underway, it will mean approximately “6,500 more titles [will be added] to the repository”. This project is likely to be completed by the end of 2011.

Find out more information about the UBC Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Digitization Project and its progress.

To browse some of the latest titles, visit the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 2008+ collection in cIRcle.

To browse some of the historical titles visit the Retrospective Theses and Dissertations collection in cIRcle.

Above partial excerpt is courtesy of Chris Hives, University Archivist in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Above image is courtesy of UBC Library’s University Archives website.

Did You Know?

The first 100 UBC theses are also available in cIRcle and date back to 1919. The first thesis by Ruth Vivian Fulton is called, A study of the estimation of iron and the separation of manganese from iron by phenyl-nitroso-hydroxylamine ammonium (cupferron). It was also the first UBC thesis in Arts and Science.

Dr. Michael Hayden has received the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award, the premier honour for leadership in medical science in Canada.

Hayden, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and director and senior scientist at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the Child & Family Research Institute, was selected for his leadership in medical genetics, entrepreneurship and humanitarianism.

To read the rest of this UBC Media Release, click here.

Did You Know?

Dr. Michael Hayden and graduate student, Jeff Carroll, were featured in Frontier:  a journal of research and discovery, issue 4, June 2008. “There’s a sense of urgency around us. What we learn from HD is likely to have a direct relevance to other diseases of a similar nature like Alzheimer’s,” Hayden says. “We believe that what we’re learning here will have a broad relevance. This is not esoteric research.” Read the article here in cIRcle.

Above excerpt in italics and image courtesy of UBC Public Affairs.

It may be a year since the 2010 Winter and Paralympic Games ended – but cIRcle is keeping the spirit, debate and dialogue that helped define the event alive.

cIRcle – also known as UBC’s information repository (https://circle.ubc.ca/) – is a digital storehouse for the University’s intellectual output. The site, which launched in 2008 by UBC Library, now features more than 30,000 items.

A key highlight is cIRcle’s Olympics and Paralympics collection, which features an array of UBC research and events related to the epic sporting event.

“For the most part this is unique material – it’s stuff that hasn’t been published anywhere,” says Tara Stephens, the Librarian overlooking the cIRcle Olympics Project. “Giving an extended life to this material is something that we’re really proud of.”

Keen to find some noteworthy contributions? There’s plenty to choose from, including a study on real estate and the Olympics from Tsur Somerville and Jake Wetzel, an Associate Professor and Ph.D. student, respectively, at the Sauder School of Business.

Or you could check out a presentation of the influential Olympic Games Impact Study, given by Rob Van Wynsberghe, a Human Kinetics Professor.

There are plenty of riveting events to experience as well. Missed the Sport and Society Dialogue the first time around? Don’t worry – you can simply visit cIRcle and listen to high-profile speakers such as Rick Hansen, a Paralympic athlete and the pivotal figure of the Man in Motion World Tour, and Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, discuss the power of sport for social change.

Or you could tune into a sound clip from the welcome and introduction to a graduate student conference entitled “Ideology in Motion: On the Relationship of Sports and Politics.” “That was a really good example of how we went out and partnered with the students,” Stephens says.

Users from around the world, led by those in the United States, have viewed the Olympics-related research and materials stored in cIRcle. Perhaps not too surprisingly, some viewers have also hailed from Russia – the site of the Sochi 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Stephens, who joined the cIRcle team in mid-2009, is still involved with the project, and is following up with contacts to see if there is further material to submit.

If you would like more information, or have UBC-related material that you would like to submit to cIRcle’s Olympics offering, please contact tara.stephens@ubc.ca.

Did You Know?

There are over 40 archived contributions regarding the Olympics-related research and materials stored in cIRcle. To see them for the first time or re-visit them, click here.

Above excerpt in italics courtesy of Glenn Drexhage, Communications & Marketing Officer, IKBLC

Above image is courtesy of Tagh Sira, student reporter from The Ubyssey newspaper and the UBC 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Secretariat website.

Dimas Yusuf, a second-year UBC medical student, is this year’s recipient of UBC Library’s Innovative Dissemination of Research Award. Yusuf’s submission, entitled Transcription Factor Encyclopedia (TFe), is a wiki-based software system that houses more than 800 articles about TF genes. This special class of genes is critical to learning how to use embryonic stem cells for the treatment of human disease.

This online gene encyclopedia encourages experts to create short summaries of the known information about each TF, and will benefit doctors, scientists, clinicians and those who work in life sciences. Yusuf’s work is sponsored by Professor Wyeth Wasserman from the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics.

Did You Know?

Previous awards and honors received by Dimas Yusuf include the following: Faculty of Medicine Summer Student Research Program (2009), Peter Lee Scholar in Finance (2008), and the Sauder School of Business Dean’s List (2004 to 2008). He received this latest award, UBC Library’s Innovative Dissemination of Research Award, officially at the Celebrate Research Week Award Gala on March 10, 2011. To learn more about this award, click here. To learn more about the previous year’s award winner, Dr. Michael Brauer, visit cIRcle.

Above excerpt in italics is courtesy of the Scholarly Communications @ UBC website and above image is courtesy of Jill Pittendrigh.

The Celebrate Research Award Gala is an invitation-only event for distinguished members of UBC’s research community. This special evening recognizes UBC researchers who have received top prizes and accolades from UBC or external agencies in BC, Canada and internationally.  Congratulations to the most recent winners of UBC’s Faculty Research Awards!  All award winners will be recognized at the Celebrate Research Awards Gala on March 10, 2011.

Celebrate Research Week Events:

Thursday, March 10th

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
CfIS Your Degree in Three
College for Interdisciplinary Studies
CK. Choi Building, Room 120
1855 West Mall
UBC Point Grey Campus

3:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Interactive Research Colloquium on Health and Occupation
Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy
Diamond Health Care Centre, Room 11268
Vancouver General Hospital

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 9:00 AM – Sat, March 12, 2011 5:00 PM
Heart + Lung Health FEST 2011
Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre
1088 Burrard Street
Vancouver, BC

Did You Know?

The multidisciplinary research centre – Centre for Health & Environment Research (CHER) – has a mission to “research and prevent diseases caused by hazards in outdoor and indoor environments”. It was also “funded from 2003-2009 by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research“. Today, you can find 40 CHER research papers in cIRcle.

Above excerpt in italics and image is courtesy of the UBC Celebrate Research Week website.