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The librarian is in (the DTES)

What is a UBC academic librarian doing in the Downtown Eastside? What is he doing on Twitter? What does this all have to do with open access? We sat down with Nick Ubels to find out.

Geoff D’Auria
Communications Specialist
UBC Learning Exchange

Nick Ubels, community engagement librarian, at the back door of the UBC Learning Exchange.

In April 2020, the UBC Learning Exchange hired its first community engagement librarian to work out of its building in the Downtown Eastside. Since then, Nick Ubels has been finding innovative ways to connect with, learn about, and address the information priorities of community organizations and residents. For two weeks (Oct. 18-29), Nick is taking over the Learning Exchange’s Twitter account to see how digital tools might help him do so. We sat down with Nick to learn more about what he does and the role academic librarians can play in the Downtown Eastside.

Hi Nick, let’s start at the beginning. What is a community engagement librarian?

Sure, well, librarians in general might describe their work as connecting people with information. A community engagement librarian works alongside community members to learn about their information priorities and needs and respond in a relevant way. The work that I do applies this philosophy to an academic context. I explore how to provide non-university communities with resources that were previously prioritized for faculty, staff, and students.

What does that mean in practice?

It means, for example, that I’m working out of the UBC Learning Exchange building in the Downtown Eastside and connecting with and listening to community organizations and residents through the Learning Exchange’s existing networks. It means that I help find research to support things like funding applications, advocacy work, or to support the development of new programming for community organizations. It means that I sometimes facilitate workshops on information literacy topics or answer research questions in person, by email, or over the phone. These consultations may be 10 minutes and a quick online search, or an hour where we step through numerous academic resources together and really engage in the search process to find the right information.

Sounds expensive.

Actually, it’s free! The market cost for a service like this typically ranges from $50 to $250 per hour but it’s important to the UBC Learning Exchange and to UBC in general that we offer the service for free to Downtown Eastside community members. After all, UBC conducts a significant amount of research in the neighbourhood. The Learning Exchange thinks we have a responsibility to make the results of that research available and easy to find for community members.

How is this different from what VPL offers?

Vancouver Public Library (VPL) offers a huge range of services, resources, and spaces for community members to access. I connect and collaborate with staff there all the time and they are fantastic. I actually worked there for a while before coming into this role. As a public library, VPL has a different mandate than UBC and the UBC Learning Exchange but we work together to respond to different community information priorities in a coordinated way. Specifically, I’m more focused on access to research.

How do you do that?

A big focus of my work has been advancing the Making Research Accessible initiative, also called the “MRAi.” Community members had been saying for years that the Downtown Eastside supports a disproportionate amount of research for its size and capacity and that the results of that research can be difficult to access. That’s why we created the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal, also called the “DTES RAP” or “DTES Research Access Portal.”

That’s a lot of acronyms. Let’s start with the RAP. What is that? 

The RAP is a really amazing free, online portal the team has been working on since 2015 to respond to that community feedback. Simply put, we’ve been identifying research that’s related to the Downtown Eastside and cataloguing it online.

Think of it like a card catalogue that libraries would use in the days before computers to make it easier to find books. Those card catalogues had individual cards that told you a little bit about a book and where to find it. In this case, we’re using webpages instead of cards and, in the background through the magic of software, we’re adding information to those webpages to make them easier to find when you search. There’s a lot of complexity to it but that gives you a sense of it.

So, it’s all open access?

Not exactly.

But you said it’s free?

Much of it is but here’s the tricky part. Not all research is publicly available to start with. Some of it is in journals that require paid subscriptions, for example. So, we’ve been contacting researchers and working with them to store versions of their work in UBC’s open access repository, a system called cIRcle. It’s not an easy process because it involves some complicated licensing and copyright concerns, but we regularly support authors to make their research items open access. As a result, the team now has a lot of expertise on how to do this. So, if you are a researcher with articles, plain language summaries, infographics or other research materials related to the Downtown Eastside and you want support to make those materials open access, please contact us. We can help.

Of course, some research items don’t have any open access options. We still catalogue those so that we have a more comprehensive list of research. If you come across one of those items in the RAP, contact me and I can help you find another way to access them.

Pirated copies from the dark web?

No! Copyright is really important. But there are other ways you might be able to access items. For example, if you’re able to go to the UBC Library in person or if you are an UBC alumnus, there are some other ways to get copies. In certain cases, I might even be able to contact a researcher to get a copy. The point being, contact me and we can talk through what might be possible without entering the dark web.

OK, so it’s a comprehensive catalogue of mostly open access research. Got it.

Well, it’s not comprehensive but we’re getting there. First of all, we decided to focus only on research that’s been produced in the last ten years. But, even with that limitation, there are already more than 1,150 items! And we’re adding more every month. So, it’s not comprehensive but it is an excellent place to start your search.

That’s a lot of research!

Yes, it is! Think about that for a moment. Just imagine how much time and energy it takes for a community to support all that research. This touches on a secondary goal of the project. We hope that having a central location where students and others can learn about the research history of the neighbourhood will reduce research-related burdens on the Downtown Eastside community and perhaps reduce the likelihood of study duplication.

Note, too, that the collection also includes research-related materials that Downtown Eastside organizations have chosen to share. Speaking of which, if anyone reading this works with a community organization that would like to include links to their work in the RAP, please contact us. But, yes, that’s a lot of research and we’re still working through a backlog of more than a hundred items.

How do you know what to include in the portal?

We’re always looking for guidance from members of the community. In fact, we are currently running a one-question poll to get feedback on collection priorities. If you’re a Downtown Eastside community member, we’d love to hear from you.

Besides accessing research, what else do you do?

Besides helping local residents find research papers from the projects they were involved in or deep dives on specific research, I also offer various kinds of workshops, as I mentioned. Here’s an example: I recently led a workshop on how to complete a literature review for community researchers who were interested in presenting at conferences and publishing their research, and who generally wanted to know more about the scholarly process. That’s one example.

And what are you doing on the UBC Learning Exchange Twitter account?

Twitter and social media in general are promising ways to engage with folks about information. In fact, a recent study showed Twitter does more to dispel misinformation than any other social media channel. So, I’ve “taken over” the account for two weeks to experiment with Twitter as a way to engage with researchers, students, and the community at large. I’m re-tweeting information about open access, I’ve got online reference desk hours from 3 to 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoons where people can ask me questions through Twitter, and I’m highlighting different aspects of the RAP. So, please, connect with me and say ‘Hello’!

Sounds fun! Thanks for your time, Nick, and good luck on Twitter!

Questions for Nick? Connect with him as he “takes over” the UBC Learning Exchange Twitter account, @UBC_LE, from Oct. 18-29. For free, one-on-one consultations or any other questions, contact him directly at nick.ubels@ubc.ca

Nick’s role is a cross-appointment between the UBC Learning Exchange and the UBC Library. The Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal is guided by the Making Research Accessible initiative, a partnership between the UBC Learning Exchange and the UBC Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, with input from the Vancouver Public Library, the Simon Fraser Public Library, the UBC Knowledge Exchange unit, and the UBC Office of Community Engagement.

This story was originally published on the UBC Learning Exchange website here.