News
DTES RESEARCH
ACCESS PORTAL
Portal Snapshot: 2026
Kendall Wilber (she/her)
MRAi Student Librarian
UBC Library & UBC Learning Exchange
RAP surpasses 2,200 items with 448 added since 2023
Welcome to the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal (DTES RAP) Snapshot for 2026! This snapshot is an overview of our growth since the DTES RAP began six years ago, and it will cover growth and updates from May 2022 to April 2026. Since our last snapshot (found here), 488 new item records have been added to the RAP, surpassing the 2,200 item mark! This includes links to items such as scholarly articles, infographics, reports, and more.
In the past year especially, we focused on adding more Open Access (OA), free-to-read resources. As of 2026, 64 per cent of our items are open access, which means they aren’t locked behind paywalls or available only to people with academic credentials, but are available to all. Locating these types of resources and adding them to the RAP is a large part of our work.
As our collection has grown, so has our online engagement. From 2025-2026, Google Analytics tells us that we had 6,306 website users, about double the amount from the previous year! We’ve also had 44,035 pageviews this year, the most that we have had since 2023.
See below for more interesting RAP stats!
Number of items in the RAP by year, from 2020-2026
The chart below shows RAP growth by category. In 2023, we put a large focus on community-generated materials for the RAP. In the past two years, we have focused more on adding academic research.
RAP growth by category, 2022-2026
During 2026, the RAP saw significant increases in these topic areas:
- Arts, Culture, History and Heritage
- Labour, Income, and Social Services
- Gender, Sexuality, and Identity
- Public Spaces
- Law and Legal Aid
Our current top three topic areas, Substance Use, Health and Wellbeing, and Housing and Homelessness, have remained the same since 2024. You can browse through all of our topic areas on this page. As always, please reach out to us if you have new topic suggestions or would like to see more of a certain topic on the RAP.
RAP growth by topic area, 2022-2026
Our top three genres are currently scholarly articles, reports, and theses/dissertations. Our fourth largest genre is research summaries/snapshots, which includes items that give brief overviews of scholarly articles, often with pictures and graphics. The list below shows genres that have grown since 2023 highlighted in green. In the past three years, we’ve added our first poems and our first musical recording to the RAP. Because the RAP links outward to other websites, this gives us the flexibility to add a variety of genres and formats.
List of items in the RAP by genre, with growth since 2023 highlighted in green
In 2025 and 2026, the amount of open access items in our collection increased significantly. We now have nearly 1,500 open access articles which can be read for free.
RAP growth by access type, 2022-2026
The pie chart below shows an overview of our items by access type, as of April 2026. Only 12 per cent of our items are mediated access, meaning that they are not free to read online, but may be accessed with library assistance. We are always working to have these items made freely accessible in the portal. If you have questions about the different levels of access and what they mean for our collection, you can see the definitions on our Help page. If you would like to access a restricted item, please reach out to our team at our shared email address (mrai.info@ubc.ca) and we will do our best to help you find a copy. Additionally, if you are a researcher and would like to make your work visible on the RAP, please contact us and we can help you through this process.
Percentages of RAP items by access type
Our collection includes records linking out to research materials from educational institutions as well as materials from community organizations within the Downtown Eastside. These lists show our top 8 institutional affiliations and our top 8 community affiliations in the RAP. The percentages next to the names show the percentage of items mentioned in the RAP with that affiliation.
List of top 8 institutional affiliations and top 8 community affiliations in the RAP
What’s new for the RAP?
In more recent years, we have added links to research summaries by UBC students to our collection in the form of easy-to-read infographics, web pages, and videos. These summaries are part of an initiative called the UBC SHARE Project. To view all of the UBC SHARE Project items at once, you can set up an advanced search on the RAP and enter “UBC SHARE Project” in the affiliations field. The search should look like this:
Screenshot of advanced search for UBC SHARE Project items
After you click “search,” you will see all 46 items that have been added to the RAP as part of the UBC SHARE Project. Feel free to browse through these visual, creative resources.
Results page after searching “UBC SHARE Project” in the affiliations field on the RAP
We have also been working on a new list of subject terms for the RAP, called a controlled vocabulary. This work has been led by one of our student research assistants, Jill Henderson, as part of UBC’s 3CV project. The 3CV project seeks to create community-centered vocabularies for collections and more thoughtful ways of describing materials. Each item in the RAP ideally will have a few subject terms attached to it. These terms are meant to make searching in the RAP easier and display accurate results. Our new controlled vocabulary will improve the search experience by using subject terms which are ethical and preferred by community members. This work is ongoing, and the controlled vocabulary will continue to be revised and updated in the future.
The DTES RAP was created as part of the Making Research Accessible Initiative (MRAi). The goal of this initiative is to improve access to research and other items related to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, as well as provide broader access to community-generated materials. You can read the MRAi’s foundational report here. We look forward to expanding the DTES RAP further, describing our resources more accurately, and incorporating feedback into our collection. As the RAP continues to grow, we welcome input on how we can improve. If you have suggestions for the RAP or know of items that we can add to our collection, please feel free to use our contact form or send an email to mrai.info@ubc.ca. Thank you for keeping up with the RAP!
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Do you have questions or feedback about this article? Do you have an idea for the news section? Please reach out to the MRAi team members at mrai.info@ubc.ca with any questions, suggestions, or comments.
