Photo courtesy: geralt via Pixabay
The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) holds mathematical workshops at several locations worldwide, and creates video recordings of presentations held during these workshops.
BIRS has been a long-standing project partner with cIRcle, collaborating over a decade ago to build an automated deposit feed of these video recordings from the Banff location. This innovative initiative received wide informal and formal recognition, and over time, expanded to capture recordings from the Oaxaca location. This resulted in deposit of over 9000 items to cIRcle’s BIRS Workshop Lecture Videos collection in UBC Library’s Open Collections, leading to millions of user views, and hundreds of thousands of user downloads.
2025 Re-Launch
The automated deposit feed was paused in summer 2021 due to limited resourcing, and cIRcle is pleased to share that in collaboration with BIRS and UBC IT, it re-launched in November 2025 with numerous enhancements. The re-launch aligns the workflow with current repository requirements and best practices, including provision of openly available videos of higher quality, and expanded descriptive metadata.
Moving forward, content is received weekly from the Banff site, anticipated to average approximately 1000 presentations across 50 workshops annually. A previously present 6-month deposit delay has been removed, so presentations are made available in cIRcle within weeks (or even days!) of workshop conclusion, providing more immediate access to all. Via cIRcle, this content is indexed widely by various discovery layers and search engines (including Google), extending the reach, discovery, and use of these recordings.
The workflow monitoring has also been enhanced, ensuring smooth operations with responsive interventions as-needed, and that all content is received fulsomely and accurately. The workflow steps have also been streamlined to integrate further with cIRcle’s digital preservation activities, ensuring a sustainable workflow for long-term stewardship.
Future considerations
While only the Banff location is initially included in the re-launched workflow, cIRcle and BIRS will continue to collaborate and identify future opportunities to add additional locations (such as the UBC Okanagan location) to the automated deposit feed.
Should capacity and priorities permit, cIRcle may also explore further descriptive metadata enhancements.
Alternative Outputs
While a large majority of cIRcle’s content is text-based content, cIRcle accepts many non-textual teaching and research outputs, such as lecture and workshop recordings. Explore a sample of alternative research outputs in cIRcle.
If you have any questions about this project or other potential deposits, please contact the cIRcle Office.