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How Do File Formats Affect Accessibility & Preservation?

By Sonia Comstock on Mar 24, 2026

A closeup photo of a student who is taking notes in a notebook, in front of a laptop.

Image courtesy of Margo Yacheshyn / UBCO University Relations

To support cIRcle’s mission of open access and long-term preservation, cIRcle’s File Format Guidelines offer recommendations and suggestions on how to create accessible, stable, and usable digital files. Through this resource, we aim to help UBC community members who wish to deposit their works to cIRcle create a strong version of their materials, for use by a wide audience. Digital files created with accessibility and long-term preservation in mind contributes to increasing digital accessibility more broadly, in addition to increasing the availability and use of materials at UBC.

The creation and maintenance of accessible digital resources is a vital part of the transition to a more broadly accessible society, and it’s important to ensure that the digital resources we create are available to all users—and that said resources remain that way over the long-term.

There are important, concrete steps that can be taken to make content both more accessible and more stable into the future. While there is no universal format that can be accessible to all, there are numerous worthwhile steps that can be taken to increase the accessibility of digital materials. Read on to find out more about file formats, why they are important for cIRcle, and how you might strengthen your digital outputs.

What are File Formats, and How Do They Affect Usability?

Essentially, file formats are containers for digital content. Using a container that fails to provide equitable access, or that isn’t well suited to preservation, puts that content behind a barrier and threatens the ability to use that content in the future. Attributes that might not seem like issues at first glance can have significant downstream effects—meaning that it’s incredibly important to pay attention to file format choices.

For example, putting content in a recognized-text PDF file means that most screen readers can read it, unlike PDFs that are image-only (i.e. a PDF that has no searchable or selectable text). These types of limitations can create significant barriers for persons who are blind or visually impaired, persons who have learning disabilities, or persons with physical disabilities. Similarly, a lack of transcript for video or audio files can create barriers to access for persons who have difficulty hearing, seeing, or understanding the media contained within.

File formats can also have a significant impact on digital preservation efforts, with certain formats being less stable than others. To support our digital preservation activities, cIRcle may change the file format of submitted material during the deposit process (for example, a DOCX file may be converted to a PDF) to ensure the materials remain useable into the future. Additionally, cIRcle recommends against using proprietary file formats wherever possible, as they can pose additional challenges for long term preservation and general access by users.

Content Preparation

Small changes can make a large difference in the accessibility of materials. The cIRcle File Format Guidelines provide users with some concrete and practical steps to help them understand how to prepare their files for submission. The following examples highlight some thoughtfully created materials in cIRcle that act to make open access content more accessible to all:

When creating Academic Choices and Existential Perils : a tabletop role-playing game, the creators made sure that the PDFs had recognizable text and were in a screen readable fonts, tagged for assistive software and hardware, and had alt-text for the images within. A plain-text version in DOCX format was also provided as an additional access option for users of screen readers, or for anyone who would benefit from having a copy without the visual elements.

Additionally, the creators of the Thinking Climate Change podcast added an individual transcript for each podcast episode in a screen-readable font, with the transcript for each episode clearly noting the speaker’s name each time the speaker changes.

Accessible video deposits can include a number of elements, and the Using cIRcle to Share Community Engaged Research is one example. The creators provided a captioned MP4 file for the video itself; a tagged, readable PDF of the slides used; a copy of said slides in PPT format; and a tagged, readable PDF transcript that clearly notes the speaker’s name each time the speaker changes. The creators also ensured that all materials used a screen readable font.

Deposit Your Research

Have you reviewed our File Format Guidelines and want to submit your materials to cIRcle, or do you have further questions about how to prepare your files for cIRcle? If so, please consult our Submissions page for more information!

Further Reading

Guidelines for creating accessible documents. Government of Canada. Accessed March 5th, 2026.

OER Accessibility Toolkit. Open UBC. Accessed March 5th, 2026.

Accessibility 101: How to Make Content Accessible. University of British Columbia. Accessed March 5th, 2026.

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Student submissions to cIRcle: What, why, and how?

By cIRcle Office on Mar 10, 2026

Three students sitting in front of a laptop computer in Irving K. Barber Library on the UBC Vancouver. The students are smiling and appear to be collaborating on a project.

Photo courtesy UBC Library Communications and Marketing

As UBC’s institutional repository, cIRcle supports all current UBC students seeking to make their research and course outputs openly accessible online. Our student collections grow each semester, with more than 2,000 non-thesis graduate level publications and nearly 3,000 undergraduate works currently available in Open Collections.

Read on to find out more about how we support student publications in cIRcle, and what UBC students and faculty should know about student deposits to cIRcle. 

Why submit to cIRcle as a student?

Submissions in cIRcle are made openly accessible online, which encourages use and engagement by scholars around the world. By contributing to cIRcle, you are contributing to the global research ecosystem. Persistent links create reliable citations, meaning that your work will be easily found and referenced for years. 

With support from a faculty supervisor, undergraduate and graduate students working on non-thesis materials can submit their work to cIRcle on an individual basis or as part of a cohort-based submission, such as a class or event. cIRcle’s metadata allows for all student works to be linked together with other works from the same course, program, or conference, highlighting the connections between students and their scholarly outputs. 

cIRcle accepts more than just papers written for courses: we encourage the submission of publications that won scholarships or other student awards, zines, cookbooks, podcasts, and more alternative research outputs. 

How to submit as a student?

The processing of submitting work to cIRcle will be different based on your level of study. All student submissions require approval from your faculty supervisor or course instructor. 

Undergraduate students can follow the quick, 5-step submission instructions on our Undergraduate Work page. After confirming your faculty supervisor supports your submission to cIRcle, prepare your file(s) by removing copyrighted materials and private information, such as student number or instructor comments. Once you submit your deposit request to cIRcle, we’ll take care of the rest. 

Graduate students can submit their non-thesis work directly to cIRcle by following the instructions on our Graduate Work (Non-thesis) page. During this process, your faculty supervisor will be asked to approve your submission directly in cIRcle. 

When submitting your student works to cIRcle, it’s important to make sure you are submitting the final, edited, approved copy of your work. Because cIRcle prioritizes preserving content for long-term, stable access, requests to change or revise your content are generally not supported.

How can faculty support students wanting to submit?

Student submissions to cIRcle generally begin with a conversation with your faculty supervisor or course instructor. After discussing your project and your aims for depositing your work to cIRcle, your supervisor or instructor will approve your work for submission to cIRcle: for undergraduates, request they complete our Student Submission Approval Form; for graduates, they will receive an email prompting their approval as soon as you submit your work to cIRcle.

If you are a faculty supervisor or course instructor and feel your student(s) have created exceptional scholarly outputs, you can encourage them to deposit to cIRcle and share the benefits that come with making their work openly accessible on a global scale. You can include deposit to cIRcle as one of your course expectations, or work with students on one-on-one to help them refine their project before depositing to cIRcle. If you are a faculty member wanting to learn more about how best to support your students with depositing to cIRcle, Contact Us for recommendations and guidance.

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Re-newed in cIRcle: BIRS Workshop Video Recordings

By cIRcle Office on Feb 24, 2026

A gradient blue background with various mathematical formulae, diagrams, and measurements in white font/print

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.

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Updates to cIRcle’s File Naming Conventions

By Sonia Comstock on Feb 10, 2026

A photo showing a UBC Digitization Centre employee adjusting a book scanner, next to a computer monitor displaying the scanned pages.

Image courtesy of UBC Library Communications and Marketing

Introduction

The cIRcle Office is happy to announce updates to the cIRcle File Naming Conventions! Consistent and thoughtfully-considered file naming standards facilitate the discovery and long-term preservation of cIRcle items, so the changes made to cIRcle’s File Naming Conventions aim to align with broader best practices. This ensures that that cIRcle is well-equipped to preserve and provide access to the works of UBC and its community. In addition, the sharing and promotion of these revised conventions can help cIRcle submitters understand why the file names of their content may be changed during cIRcle processing.

For graduate students preparing to submit their theses or dissertations to cIRcle, we recommend you review the Submitting Theses and Dissertations to cIRcle or Submitting Creative Arts Theses and Dissertations to cIRcle (MFA or MMus students only), which have also been updated to align with the broader Conventions.

What are file naming conventions, and why are they important?

Simply put, file naming conventions are standards used to name files consistently. They are commonly discussed in the context of research data management, but their use extends far beyond that—file naming conventions exist as a part of countless organizations and facilitate services all around us. While choosing file names might seem like a relatively small consideration in the context of a larger organizational workflow, file names can have significant impacts on a much wider scale. For example, if file names aren’t descriptive enough, it becomes difficult to identify and understand the files. However, when file names become overly long, they become far more prone to corruption, with the possibility for the permanent destruction of files.

In this way, creating a file naming convention is something of a balancing act, and one that requires a lot of research! By documenting the cIRcle File Naming Conventions, we aim to remove the burden of file naming research from our submitters, while ensuring transparency in the necessary work to ensure that their files conform to a standard that can be consistently applied.

Upholding good file naming conventions is vital to ensuring access, preservation, and ongoing maintenance of materials held in cIRcle.  File names should be both human- and machine-readable, meaning that the people and computer software interacting with cIRcle files are able to recognize, understand, and process the file names. Additionally, using file names that meet the standards of best practice ensures that content can be found, used, and maintained for as long as possible.

Timeline and Process

Updating cIRcle’s file naming conventions for repository submissions began as one of cIRcle’s 2024-2025 Unit Plan goals. cIRcle’s 2024-25 cIRcle Digital Repository Research Assistant, Fraser Sutherland, wrote a comprehensive report reviewing cIRcle’s existing file naming conventions and current best practices more broadly, resulting in numerous recommendations.

After the recommendations were reviewed and prioritized by the cIRcle Office, the implementation phase of the project began in Winter 2025-26 via an iterative drafting process by the current Digital Repository Research Assistant, under the guidance of the cIRcle Digital Repository Librarian and cIRcle Library Specialist. The changes went live in late January 2026.

Additions and Changes

Our updates include the additions to permitted characters, more detailed and comprehensive instructions, updated examples, new guidelines around multi-file deposits, and more. These updates also extend beyond changes to practices—we also chose to expand the rationale behind our Conventions, to provide users with a deeper understanding of what file naming conventions are, and the impacts to the discovery and preservation of their work.

We hope the information we have provided can help readers understand the deeper principles behind why these choices in our Conventions were made, fostering a more complex and nuanced understanding of file names that they can take into future research, employment, or general digital asset management settings.

Learn More and Deposit Your Research

Interested in learning more about file naming best practices? Check out UBC Library Research Data Management: Why is file naming important?, or consider attending an upcoming Data Bites Workshop on file naming best practices!

Are you a UBC faculty member, student, staff, or community partner interested in submitting your work to cIRcle? If so, consult our Submissions page for more information or contact us!

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Connecting Workflows in Open Scholarship

By Leila Malkin on Jan 27, 2026

Aerial view of UBC’s Koerner Library and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, with connecting pathways, plazas, and green spaces visible between the buildings.

Image courtesy of Paul Joseph / UBC Brand & Marketing / UBC Studios

My name is Leila Malkin, and I work as the Scholarly Communications Assistant in UBC Library’s Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office. My work connects with several teams across the Library, including cIRcle. Moving between different open scholarship workflows has shown me how many people and processes contribute to making UBC-created materials available to a wider community. The tasks are varied, but they all contribute to the broader goal of supporting open scholarship at the university.

Working in the Open

One thing I have learned is that working in the open involves more steps than many people expect. The idea of sharing work freely suggests a simple process, but there are varying permissions, policies, and technical requirements that need to be taken into account when deciding how to make the material available.

A significant portion of our work involves helping UBC faculty instructors and researchers understand these numerous pieces, so they can share their materials openly with confidence. For faculty getting started with open education, Open UBC provides examples, guides, and contacts to help with open teaching and OER development. For questions about open access and sharing research outputs, the Scholarly Communications Open Access page and the cIRcle FAQs offer guidance on author rights, permissions, and the cIRcle deposit process.

Supporting Green Open Access

For previously published work (such as journal articles), the support often begins with determining the permitted version and where it can be shared. This usually involves reviewing ownership and publisher policies. These policies outline what rights authors retain, which version of their article they can reuse, and where that version can legally be posted. We use resources like the UBC Library Author’s Guide to Self-Archiving, Publication Versions and Permissions to walk faculty through these conditions and help them identify the version that can be deposited into cIRcle.

I encounter this process regularly while doing cIRcle outreach and recruitment for initiatives such as Paper Pledge for the Planet. The outreach process involves reviewing articles that are behind a paywall, confirming through the journal’s policy whether a sharable version exists, and then reaching out to authors with the details. This work supports what is known as green open access.

Green open access involves depositing a version of a published work in a non-commercial repository so it can be read and used without a subscription. In many cases, authors are able to share an accepted or post-print version of their article even if the final published version remains behind a paywall. Figuring out the sharing options for a specific article ahead of time allows us to offer clear guidance and keep the cIRcle deposit process as straightforward as possible for the UBC faculty member. For more information on this process, see cIRcle’s previous post on Publishing grant-funded research articles in cIRcle : The Green Open Access Route.

Supporting Open Educational Resources (OER)

Work with open educational resources (OER) follows a different process because instructors often connect for support while materials are still being created or adapted. OER are teaching and learning materials that are free to use, adapt, and share. Rather than navigating publisher policies for already published work, OER development focuses on building teaching and learning materials that can be openly shared from the outset.

At UBC, support for OER development is coordinated through Open UBC, which brings together expertise from the Library and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT). The Open UBC site provides a starting point for instructors interested in open education, including examples of existing OER, guidance on licensing and attribution, and information about project planning and funding.

My role within this broader effort primarily focuses on supporting open textbooks and other teaching materials developed in Pressbooks. In practice, this means working with instructors as they shape their content into a polished, shareable resource. I help review materials they plan to reuse, such as images or diagrams, to confirm they can be shared openly, and support instructors in applying appropriate attribution. I also assist with structuring and formatting content in Pressbooks to improve clarity, accessibility, and long-term reuse. UBC instructors bring the subject expertise; I help with the practical setup that turns that expertise into a resource that is clear, accessible, and ready to share widely and openly.

If you’re interested in incorporating OER into your teaching, it can be helpful to connect early in the process. Get in touch through Open UBC for a consultation, whether you’re exploring existing OER to replace a paid textbook or developing your own materials. You can also browse the UBC OER Collection to explore existing OER for potential adoption and/or use.

Collaboration Across Units

Across both research and teaching projects, openness is highly reliant on collaboration. No single team handles every step. Different library units (along with partners such as the CTLT), contribute technical support, design expertise, rights guidance, preservation knowledge, and platform management.

Within this network of support, cIRcle plays an important role as UBC’s institutional repository. The cIRcle team helps connect UBC research and teaching materials to the broader open access ecosystem by ensuring they are shared openly, clearly described, and easy to find through repositories and discovery tools. This work helps preserve and promote UBC’s scholarly output so it can be used both within and beyond the university.

My role is one part of this larger network. I help connect people with the information and tools they need, and I make sure that the practical details of sharing are handled with care. When these pieces come together, the result is material that is easy to find, understand, and reuse.

If you’re ready to share your journal article or OER in cIRcle, check out the cIRcle Submissions page, or contact the cIRcle Office.

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