A couple of years ago, UBC Library’s Hilde Colenbrander challenged a student from the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies to determine the amount of Olympics-related research and teaching on the UBC Vancouver campus.
The resulting report was striking, as it highlighted all sorts of material from an array of departments and faculties: Education, Law, Economics, Political Science, Medicine, Geography/Urban Studies, Psychology, the School of Population and Public Health, to name a few. Graduate and undergraduate activities were included, as was a listing of UBC courses on the Olympics.
So there’s no doubt that a wealth of valuable Olympics-related work exists at UBC. But that leads to another issue: how can so many disparate items be made easily available in one spot?
Enter Tara Stephens, who joined the ranks of cIRcle – UBC’s online storehouse for the University’s teaching and research output – in October 2009. Stephens, who previously was a Reference Librarian for Humanities and Social Sciences, will focus on gathering as much of UBC’s Olympics material as possible to store in cIRcle. Contributions are voluntary; the goal is to make the content universally available and have the project serve as a long-term UBC legacy.
Stephens has been busy networking with the campus community and tracking Olympics/Paralympics-related events and people at UBC. She’s also struck up a great working relationship with the UBC 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Secretariat.
UBC Library launched cIRcle more than two years ago, and Colenbrander serves as its Co-ordinator. To date, the repository hosts more than 16,000 items and more material is added daily. The biggest proportion of submissions in cIRcle consists of theses and dissertations, but there are many other items, including webcasts and podcasts. cIRcle is also an “open access” repository, meaning that its contents are freely available to users around the world.
Its Olympics-inspired appointment is indeed opportune. In Place and Promise, UBC’s new strategic plan (www.strategicplan.ubc.ca), one of the action items under “Research Excellence” calls for the development of “a campus strategy for making UBC research accessible in digital repositories, especially open access repositories.” Given such support and cIRcle’s rapid growth, the effort to share UBC’s research and teaching legacies – Olympic and otherwise – with the world is well-underway.
For more information, please visit https://circle.ubc.ca