The following is a snapshot of select projects undertaken by the cIRcle Office in outreach, metadata enhancements, discovery and access initiatives, and preservation workflows.
Projects supported 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.
Visit our Submissions page to deposit your work or Contact Us to ask questions, report a problem, or suggest new projects.
Outreach
Paper Pledge for the Planet: cIRcle Campaign
UBC faculty, researchers, and postdoctoral students are invited to join the Paper Pledge for the Planet global campaign. The goal is to provide permanent, open access to climate change research articles via institutional repositories like cIRcle. Read more about the campaign on the cIRcle blog or visit our Submissions page for details on adding your work to cIRcle.
Electronic Thesis And Dissertations (ETD) Supervisor Recruitment
The ETD Supervisor Recruitment project aims to aims to deposit research articles authored by faculty supervisors of recent theses and dissertations at UBC Vancouver. This work leverages recent cIRcle metadata initiatives to include supervisor metadata in ETD item records and to perform name authority on faculty names to enhance discovery.
Read more about this initiative: Wrapping Up for the Term
COVID-19 Research Content Recruitment
The cIRcle COVID-19 Research Content Recruitment project aimed to provide permanent open access to UBC-authored COVID-19 research that might otherwise have remained inaccessible to the public. Between June 2020 and October 2024, this project resulted in nearly 150 research articles being made openly available via cIRcle. The project concluded in December 2024.
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. 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
Metadata Enhancements
Retroactive population of Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETD) Supervisor metadata
As of May 2021, the names of Co/Supervisors are captured in cIRcle’s electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) metadata, providing helpful discovery and access points and further connecting these valuable university outputs. In 2024, cIRcle began efforts to retroactively populate this field for approximately 4,600 records submitted to cIRcle prior to field implementation. Initial work for this project has been completed, which involved collaboration with Library Staff across units to retrieve identified items and record Co/Supervisor names. cIRcle is now exploring work to ensure names are captured in a consistent form, followed by population into the cIRcle record metadata.
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
Technical and Web Enhancements
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