cIRcle’s 2021-2022 Impact and Activity Report is now live!
2021-2022 saw continued growth and development for cIRcle, UBC’s research repository. Over 77,000 items have been made openly accessible by cIRcle to date, including more than 6,000 peer-reviewed research articles. More than 50% of all visitors to UBC’s Open Collections accessed cIRcle content last year, with an estimated 1.2 million new visitors to cIRcle content alone.
Each year, contributions from UBC faculty members represent 50% or more of our annual deposits. Over 2,000 faculty-authored articles, books, and presentations are added to cIRcle annually, making our UBC Faculty Research and Publications collection a valuable resource for visitors from around the world.
Fostering new and ongoing partnerships with UBC faculty, students, and our larger research community remained a key priority for cIRcle in 2021-2022. This reporting year, established partners such as Rural Health Services Research Network of BC (RHSRNbc) and the Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry contributed significant works to cIRcle addressing topical subjects such as the impacts of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the significant historical contributions of Black nurses to health care in Canada. Building on one of the largest non-thesis collections in the repository, cIRcle also collaborated with the From the Ground Up: Buddhism and East Asian Religions (FROGBEAR) project team to add 632 high-quality images created by University of California at Berkeley graduate student Hannibal Taubes. cIRcle also supports Undergraduate Research Excellence with collaborations such as ongoing partnerships with 2021-2022 Killam Teaching Prize winner Dr. Benjamin Cheung to archive exceptional student work such as the multi-media projects produced by students in ACAM 320B: Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.
In the cIRcle Office, many exciting updates were ushered in throughout the past year. In November 2021, the newest cIRcle Non-exclusive Distribution License (Version 3.0) was released, making it easier than ever to deposit podcasts, event recordings, workshops, and other audiovisual materials. Enhancements to Open Collections improved accessibility and discovery of cIRcle content, including making Creative Commons terms more easily identifiable to better promote sharing and re-use of UBC research outputs. To better support our graduate electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), cIRcle also implemented a new metadata field for co/supervisor names. Over 1,600 ETDs now have this information available, making it easier for researchers and prospective students to connect with experts in their field.
Curious to see all this in action? Check out UBC research in cIRcle!