cIRcle Projects
The following selection of projects captures a snapshot of activities undertaken by the cIRcle Office with a focus on outreach and content recruitment, metadata enhancements, discovery and access initiatives, and preservation workflows. Projects led by Work Learn students at cIRcle feature prominently as their efforts make valuable contributions to advancing knowledge about best practices for item discoverability and research dissemination.
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Accessibility
Website Accessibility Audit
In 2022, cIRcle conducted an informal audit of cIRcle's WordPress-hosted website following guidance from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and using various evaluation tools, including the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. This website audit was intended to identify areas for improvement of web accessibility across the cIRcle website, both general recommendations on best practices for web accessibility and page-level evaluations with specific actionable improvements. The initial audit for this project was completed in March 2022 and recommendations were implemented between June 2022 and March 2023.
Read more about this initiative : Accessibility Review
Metadata Enhancements
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETD) Subject Headings Analysis
In 2021, cIRcle undertook an analysis of subject headings of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) to identify the extent of Subject Keywords containing outdated, inappropriate, or problematic terminology as it pertains to Indigenous peoples, communities, and cultures. The initial phase of the project addressed ETDs created prior to 2008 (known at UBC as Retrospective ETDs) and was completed in 2022. Phase two of the project addressed the remainder of affected ETDs created after 2008 and was completed in Summer 2023.
Read more about this project: Inclusive Metadata: Legacy Subject Keywords in Theses & Dissertations at cIRcle
Author Name Management
In 2021, cIRcle investigated author name management practices for the UBC Faculty collection, with the goal of disambiguating and reconciling name variants found within the collection. Initial explorations into sustainable workflows included the use of OpenRefine for data cleaning, Library of Congress (LC) Name Authorities and UBC departmental pages for author identification, and Google Sheets for collaborative identification of author names needing disambiguating and/or reconciling. This work is an on-going project for cIRcle.
Read more about this initiative: Author Name Management in cIRcle
Outreach and Content Recruitment
COVID-19 Research Content Recruitment
The cIRcle COVID-19 Research Content Recruitment project aims to provide permanent open access to UBC-authored COVID-19 research that might otherwise remain inaccessible to the public. Now in its third year, this project has resulted in more than 150 research articles being added to cIRcle.
Read more about this initiative: The cIRcle COVID-19 Research Content Recruitment Project
Project Partners
cIRcle works in collaboration with UBC academic units, Library branches, and other groups within the UBC community to build our digital collections. In cIRcle, you can find articles, conference and workshop papers, theses and dissertations, technical reports and working papers, books, datasets, learning objects, multimedia and audio-visual materials including podcasts, webcasts, and more. cIRcle provides a permanent, openly accessible home for thousands of peer-reviewed articles and non-traditional research outputs, making it a valuable resource for interdisciplinary research and inquiry.
Learn more about who's contributing to cIRcle with our project partner highlights: cIRcle Project Partners