What is cIRcle?

cIRcle is an open access digital repository for published and unpublished material created by the UBC community and its partners. Its aim is to showcase and preserve UBC’s unique intellectual output by making content freely available to anyone, anywhere via the web.

What can I find in cIRcle?

Through 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 features both peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed content making it a valuable resource for interdisciplinary research and inquiry.

How is cIRcle organized?

cIRcle content is organized around communities and collections. Communities are UBC departments, labs, research centres, schools or other administrative units. Each community oversees one or more of its own collections, which contain submitted items. Collections and communities, therefore, have their own distinct identity and content.

How is cIRcle connected to UBC Library?

cIRcle is a service of the UBC Library and is a key player supporting the 'Accelerate Research' strategic direction in the Library's Strategic Plan which in turn is based on UBC's core commitment to 'Research Excellence' as described in Place and Promise: the UBC Plan.

What software does cIRcle use?

cIRcle uses software called DSpace, an open-source system developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard. Hundreds of institutions in countries around the world use DSpace. To learn more about cIRcle’s use of DSpace, see our user guides.

Interested in adding your work to cIRcle? Visit our Getting Started guides to learn how.

Background

The system of scholarship and scholarly publishing is going through a process of change across the world. Notions of authorship and scholarly publishing are rapidly evolving in the digital age. Digital repositories (also known as information or institutional repositories) provide an opportunity to make scholarly content (including peer reviewed content) freely available online. Providing open access to an institution’s research output can make the dissemination of scholarly information more cost effective and easier, resulting in greater accountability for public tax dollars.

Timeline

In April 2006, the UBC Library’s e-Library Committee proposed the creation of a digital repository to showcase UBC’s scholarly work online. A pilot project was launched in spring 2007 and two years later, cIRcle became a full service of the Library. Today, with over 39,000 items online (and growing) scholarly communication is beginning to come full circle at UBC.

Mission

cIRcle’s main goals are:

To showcase the intellectual output of UBC and its partners by making the research carried out at UBC freely accessible;
To support teaching, learning, and research activities on campus; and
To preserve materials in cIRcle for future generations.

International Ranking

Internationally, cIRcle was recently ranked at number 48 out of 1172 institutional repositories by the Spanish Cybermetrics Lab.

Why use cIRcle?

cIRcle offers a number of services to help you manage and enhance your scholarly profile, but the three major benefits of our repository are that it is:

Simple

We will work with you to get your materials submitted and take care of indexing to make them easily findable.

Visible

cIRcle content is indexed by high-profile search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, as well as academically focused search engines and collections such as Google Scholar, OAIster and CARL making it quick and easy for scholars and others to find your work.

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Permanent

We strive to maintain your work over the long term. And we won't change URLs every time there's a webpage redesign - the links to your materials will remain the same over time.

Need more reasons? Read about how contributing to cIRcle supports Open Access and Granting Agency Mandates, or visit our Who's using cIRcle? page to see what others are saying about the benefits of using cIRcle.

If you’d like to learn more about how to deposit your work in cIRcle, visit our Getting Started guide.

Who’s using cIRcle?

cIRcle content is organized around communities representing UBC departments, labs, research centres, schools or other administrative units. There are currently more than 35,000 items in cIRcle and the number continues to grow as new communities are added.

Items in cIRcle are generally heavily used. Check out the ‘Top 3 Items’ on the cIRcle home page. Look for the ‘Show Statistical Information’ link at the bottom of each record in cIRcle, or visit our FAQ for more information.

How our contributors are using cIRcle:

"We are setting a new standard for open source materials of a very important conference series. The help and support from cIRcle to make this real is highly appreciated."

–Dirk van Zyl, Professor, Department of Mining Engineering

View the Tailings and Mine Waste 2011 collection in cIRcle!

"Th[e] digital repository offered the open access and content preservation that we hoped would capture our shared efforts in a permanent way. Our UBC cIRcle team offered support identifying, collecting and preserving material, guiding us through the more technical aspects, and keeping us engaged throughout. cIRcle is a powerful resource that was indispensable in our efforts to create a legacy from the Games."

–Michelle Aucoin, Director, UBC 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Secretariat

View the UBC and the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games collections in cIRcle!

"cIRcle allows the UBC Laboratory of Archaeology to make our reports and data available to the widest possible community of users. We provide links to cIRcle's permanent and stable repository of documents, graduate theses and dissertations in our own publications and webpages, thereby quickly disseminating valuable information that otherwise would be very difficult to access. The usage statistics that cIRcle generates are an added bonus--it is great to be able to track the number of downloads of our documents over the course of months and years."

–Michael Blake, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology

View the Laboratory of Archaeology collections in cIRcle!

"As an investigator who is taking up an ‘integrated KT’ [knowledge translation] approach to dissemination it is helpful to have some additional ways to refer to work (eg. reports) that are developed for a broader audience than the typical audience for peer reviewed publications. cIRcle does provide opportunities to link scholarly articles with work framed for a broader audience."

–Judith Lynam, Professor, School of Nursing

View Professor Lynam's report Qualitative Evidence in Practice in cIRcle!

"cIRcle is searchable, has good use information, and, above all is reliable, in our world of constantly changing url's. [...] We are impressed [by] the number of downloads recorded in cIRcle, indicating that it has a far wider circulation than we realized."

–R.G. Matson, Professor Emeritus, Dept of Anthropology/Laboratory of Archaeology

View Professor Matson's Cedar Mesa Project in cIRcle!

"Since having [my project] on cIRcle [...] I feel like it validates my project in some way because now it's publicly available it's associated with UBC and UBC Academics, and definitely makes me feel a lot more confident in its accuracy and its acceptance by an academic audience."

–Devon Wong, UBC graduate (BA Sociology, 2010)

View Devon Wong's documentary The Root Cause in cIRcle!

"Nothing makes me strive for excellence more than knowing that anyone in the world could see my work."

–Andre Malan, UBC graduate (BSC Honours Computer Science, 2011)

View the complete list of cIRcle communities and collections.

Projects

The following sections highlight just a few of the many exciting projects featured in cIRcle. For an exhaustive list, you can browse the database by communities and collections or use cIRcle's Advanced Search feature to narrow your search.

Current

This list represents a small sample of the projects currently underway.

Sauder School of Business

The Sauder School of Business has several growing collections in cIRcle including the Faculty Teaching Notes and Working Papers of the Strategy and Business Economics (SBE) division.

Library Liaison: Christina Sylka, David Lam Management Research Library

Atmospheric Science Program

The Atmospheric Science Program collection features online access to scientific papers published in American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society journals by a multidisciplinary group of UBC atmospheric science researchers.

Library Liaison: Kevin Lindstrom, Science & Engineering

Fisheries Centre

Fisheries Centre Annual Reports: Fisheries Centre Research Reports publish results of research work carried out, or workshops held, at the UBC Fisheries Centre. The series focuses on multidisciplinary problems in fisheries management and aims to provide a synoptic overview of the foundations, themes and prospects of current research.

Library Liaison, Sally Taylor, Woodward Library

Fisheries Centre Research Reports: The Fisheries Centre Reports document the establishment and expansion of the Fisheries Centre's research activities as well as present the members and units of the Fisheries Centre.

Library Liaison, Sally Taylor, Woodward Library

Forestry

Branchlines: Branchlines is a newsletter published by the Faculty of Forestry.

Library Liaison: Sally Taylor, Woodward Library

Annual Reports: UBC Faculty of Forestry Annual Reports are also available on the Forestry web site.

Library Liaison: Sally Taylor, Woodward Library

Peter Ward's research datasets

Professor Peter Ward's historical datasets on childbirth and newborn weight from seven European and North American cities, 1843-1940.

SPIE Publications

Physics & Astronomy

This collection features online access to UBC astronomy and astrophysics research published in the Proceedings of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

Library Liaison: Kevin Lindstrom, Science & Engineering

Electrical & Computer Engineering

This collection features online access to UBC electrical and computer engineering research published in the Proceedings of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

Library Liaison: Kevin Lindstrom, Science & Engineering

Completed

This list represents a small sample of the completed and ongoing projects at cIRcle.

Engineering Physics Projects

The Engineering Physics Projects collection consists of challenging and industrially relevant design projects of 4th & 5th year students (with academic interests in electronics, mechanics and computer science) who have found solutions to “real world” problems while managing funding, technical resources, time, manpower, and client/societal needs.

Library Liaison: Eugene Barsky, Science & Engineering

Centre for Sport and Sustainability

This collection features research on Sport & Sustainability including reports, presentations, theses, videos, and conference proceedings from the UBC Centre for Sport and Sustainability.

CSS Events: This collection features presentations from academic and practitioner experts related to sports and sustainability.

CSS Projects: This collection features a variety of projects related to sports and sustainability in line with its research themes including the Olympics Games Impact Report made publicly available for the first time via cIRcle.

BC Mine Reclamation Symposium, 1977-

Through UBC's Department of Mining Engineering, well over 600 papers from 34 annual symposia are available in cIRcle. New proceedings will be uploaded annually.

President Stephen Toope's speeches

cIRcle holdings are updated annually. For the most current Speeches, please visit Office of the President: Speeches and Op/eds

Theses and Dissertations

UBC Retrospective Theses and Dissertations, 1919-2007

University Archives have been working for several years to digitize pre-2008 theses and dissertations. Currently, there are nearly 28,000 full-text theses and dissertations from the periods 1919-1931 and 1968-2007 available in this collection through cIRcle.

UBC Current Theses and Dissertations, 2008+

Graduate students are required to submit their current theses and dissertations online in cIRcle.

Forestry Undergraduate Essays/Theses

UBC and the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games

This project aimed to showcase and preserve UBC’s intellectual output related to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Vancouver, BC. Examples included research or teaching outputs, proceedings or webcasts of conferences and other events, as well as other material that was Olympic inspired and of long term value.

Tailings and Mine Waste 2011: Vancouver, Canada

The proceedings of the Tailings and Mine Waste 2011 conference (TMW) are now publicly available in cIRcle, UBC’s open access digital repository.

The conference was held in Vancouver November 6 to 9, 2011. Organized by the Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering at UBC, in conjunction with Colorado State University and the University of Alberta, the conference appeals to researchers, engineers, scientists and mining representatives interested in issues related to mining. The proceedings are available for the first time online via cIRcle.

Library Liaison: Eugene Barsky, Science & Engineering

Upcoming

This list represents a small sample of the projects in the planning and consultation stage.

Environmental Science Undergraduate Research Papers and Reports

The Environmental Science Undergraduate Research Papers and Reports collection focuses on the application of scientific knowledge from many disciplines to issues and questions relating to the increase in human population, the sustainability of resource use, degradation caused by pollution and disturbance, and the endangerment and extinction of species and natural systems.

Library Liaisons: Kevin Eugene Barsky and Kevin Lindstrom, Science & Engineering

Physical Therapy (Faculty of Medicine)

The MPT Systematic Reviews and MPT Research Projects collections are podcasts of the presentations given by the graduating students in the Masters of Physical Therapy programme of the results of the research they have conducted over the past year in partnership with clinical supervisors and faculty.

Library Liaison: Charlotte Beck, Woodward Library

Canadian Literature Journal

The first 155 issues of this journal (1959-1997) will be made available in cIRcle.

Institute of Asian Research: Asia Pacific Memo

New posts from The Asia Pacific Memo are to be included in cIRcle for additional outreach and preservation purposes.