News
DTES RESEARCH
ACCESS PORTAL
Collection snapshot: November 2020
Anita Fata
Co-op Student, UBC Library & UBC Learning Exchange
MLIS candidate, UBC iSchool
Welcome to the first DTES RAP collection snapshot! This is where we take a look at the items that have been added to the portal. Since launching the DTES RAP earlier this year, the Making Research Accessible initiative (MRAi) has been working to increase the accessibility and impact of research by providing easier online access to information about the Downtown Eastside. The items on the portal cover a wide variety of topics, categories, and genres – you can learn more about these in the definitions tab of our help page.
As of today, we’ve reached 938 total items, and we’re adding more every week. As you can see, most items are Free Use, Open Access through cIRcle, the University of British Columbia’s online digital repository, but we have added items that are Free Use as a public resource available on the Internet. We have also included relevant Restricted Use items, which may require paid access. Visit our help section if you need help accessing a Restricted Use item.
The DTES RAP currently has 15 topics to explore. As you can see, we have more items in some topics than others. We are currently working to add more items that fit less populated topics such as Older People, Media Representation, and Early Childhood and Families. If you have suggestions for new topics to consider, please let us know.
Each item in the DTES RAP fits into one or more of five categories. While academic research is well represented, we’re continually adding more community materials such as the Binner’s Project latest Annual Report and creative work like Voices Up!, a zine-comic and toolkit created at the UBC Learning Exchange.
To increase the accessibility and impact of research, the DTES RAP currently includes 16 different genres, such as reports, conference papers, and newsletters. While the portal features a lot of scholarly articles, theses, and dissertations, we’ve recently added two relevant podcast episodes, one from Talking Radical Radio about Indigenous Women Rising in the Face of Injustice and the first episode from Crackdown podcast about the war on drugs and how it has affected the DTES.
One of the goals of the DTES RAP is to create opportunities for sharing and learning between community organizations, community members, researchers, students, and others. If you have an item you think should be included in the DTES RAP, please contact us to suggest an item. You can also contact us to get involved, ask questions, and find out more about making research about the DTES more accessible.
