As of October 14, 2026, SAE Mobilus has rate limited UBC’s access due to excessive downloading of over 100 articles.
We are investigating.
Please remember that most resources have limits on what can be downloaded during one session. Almost all vendors have internal benchmarks that make allowances for reasonable use – usually what a person can reasonably read.
When Pedestal was launched in September 1969 by the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (VWC), it was Canada’s first feminist periodical. VWC emerged from the New Left student-led political movement at Simon Fraser University in the late 60s, a culture that valued direct action, anti-authoritarianism, and social non-conformity and promoted causes like civil rights, Black Power, gay rights, worker’s rights, and women’s liberations.
In 1969, abortion was legalized in Canada by Bill C-150, but restrictions continued to impede access in practice. VWC famously initiated the Abortion Caravan, which travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa in the spring of 1970. This national demonstration shut down Parliament for the first time in history and is considered to have launched second-wave feminist activism within Canada. Pedestal prominently featured pro-choice political activism from the start, as seen on the cover of one of the first issues below.
VWC’s other major organizational priorities were child care, equal pay, and access to contraception, which are all reflected in Pedestal, as well. Pedestal has a distinctly socialist, pro-labour leaning, promoting the Working Women’s Union and advocating for women’s labour to be fairly valued and compensated. The newspaper was published until 1975, variously subtitled “A Women’s Liberation Newspaper,” “The Vancouver Women’s Liberation Newspaper, and “A Lesbian-Feminist Newspaper” throughout the years.
Kinesis was published from 1974 to 2001 by the Vancouver Status of Women (VSW) and was the longest running feminist periodical in Canada. VSW was founded in 1971 with the aim of ensuring implementation of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) recommendations. RCSW had helped legitimate women’s social and economic standing as a significant problem for the nation. The RCSW Report specified equal pay, maternity leave, day care, contraception, family law, financial independence, and opportunities for educational and employment advances for women as paths forward to eliminate gender inequality.
Kinesis, with the subtitle “News you won’t see in the dailies,” was officially established as a forum for feminist perspectives and platformed activists opposing sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, classism, imperialism, ableism, and other forms of oppression. Kinesis featured local, national, and international feminist issues. Although Kinesis’ last issue was published in 2001, VSW continued to actively support marginalized communities in the Lower Mainland. They currently offer grant funding for grassroots initiatives.
RCSW, like many products of first- and second-wave feminism, has been fairly criticized for excluding Indigenous women and other marginalized voices and enshrining white liberal perspectives as the foundation of the national feminist movement. However, we see through Kinesis how the monolithic idea of womanhood has been challenged from the start. Looking back at both Pedestal and Kinesis, we see imperfect representation, reflecting the largely white, privileged backgrounds of the activists involved in their parent organizations, as well as efforts made to uplift the most marginalized voices: BIPOC and LGBTQ women, immigrant workers, and incarcerated individuals, among others. The archives of these two periodicals are a valuable record of how feminist activism has evolved over the years.
You can explore full issues of both of these newspapers in Open Collections!
https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/pedestal
https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis
eferences
Ann, M. (2026, March 30). Vancouver Status of Women: Community action grants. SmartGrant. https://smartgrant.ca/2026/03/30/vancouver-status-of-women-community-action-grants/
Bunjun, B. (2018). The making of a colonial archive: The Royal Commission on the Status of Women. Education as Change, 22(2), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.25159/1947-9417/3609
Dattan, G. & Schmidt, J. (2015). Vancouver Status of Women. Vancouver Status of Women: UBC Archives. https://blogs.ubc.ca/vswarchives/vancouver-status-of-women/
Sethna, C. & Hewitt, S. (2009). Clandestine operations: The vancouver Women’s caucus, the abortion caravan, and the RCMP. The Canadian Historical Review, 90(3), 463-495. https://doi.org/10.1353/can.0.0189
Lexier, R. (2009). How did the Canadian women’s liberation movement emerge from the sixties student movements? the case of Simon Fraser University. Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000: Edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, 13(2), 85. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/how-did-canadian-womens-liberation-movement/docview/2847850273/se-2
Ann, M. (2026, March 30). Vancouver Status of Women: Community action grants. SmartGrant. https://smartgrant.ca/2026/03/30/vancouver-status-of-women-community-action-grants/
Vancouver Status of Women Fonds. 1940-2012 (Creation). University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections. RBSC-ARC-1582. Accessed July 26, 2018. http://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/index.php/vancouver-status-of-women-fonds.
UBC Library is excited to introduce Dr. Dale Askey, who joined UBC on September 1, 2026, as our incoming University Librarian for a five-year term.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Askey has filled a wide range of roles in libraries, primarily in collection development, public services, web services, and information technology management. Most recently, he served as Vice Provost (Library & Museums) and Chief Librarian at the University of Alberta.
We sat down with Dr. Askey to learn more about his views on library leadership, lessons learned from previous roles, and what’s ahead for UBC Library.
I find it really appealing to be at institutions that have a lot of ambition as well as the drive and capability to achieve that ambition.
UBC, in particular, has an excellent library full of people whose expertise is highly regarded in the profession and on campus, and yet there’s still room to grow in terms of being influential here, and also nationally. I look forward to supporting UBC to work alongside other major institutions in setting direction and helping broad national initiatives take flight. That’s an area where there’s still room for growth, and one of the reasons why I chose to apply for the job.
At its most basic, my role as a leader in a library is to help remove obstacles, be the problem-solver and make sure the resources are there for people to get their work done.
Another big part of library leadership is the need to constantly update the perception of libraries for senior leaders, donors, students and faculty. This advocacy piece, and ongoing education, is a big part of the role.
We live in an increasingly networked world and have reached the tipping point where everything is going to happen at that scale, in terms of information creation, provisioning and access. So we need to be out there at the national level. That’s the biggest opportunity for UBC Library.
Alongside that, UBC has strong goals around international impact and visibility. It’s proud of its reputation as an institution and its ranking, but it wants to go higher. And I don’t think there’s any reason why it can’t.
“I don’t have a closed-door persona and an open-door persona. What you see is what you get.”
I’m also focused on deepening and finding new ways of working with Indigenous communities that will help us address the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action and the UNDRIP articles. A lot of great work is happening in this area already, and I look forward to supporting that as a prominent part of the work of the library.
I have to mention the library management platform migration from Voyager to Alma and Primo. In my career, I’ve gone through six migrations from a legacy system—some of which were green screen systems on terminals—to a modern system. Voyager was one of those modern systems, which tells you how old I am.
You have to make a lot of decisions when you go from System A to System B. Moving the data is not simple. There’s a lot of work involved, but there are huge opportunities to question and refine your processes. These projects always go well. Everyone has a big celebration party after, and a month later you’re working in a new system and it’s awesome and you never look back.
The other thing that I’ve learned from past roles is that it’s all about visibility and trust, allowing people to get to know you and doing hard work to build that trust. I try to bring great integrity to my work, meaning that if you meet with me one-on-one or see me in a large group, what I am saying and how I’m interacting is more or less the same. I don’t have a closed-door persona and an open-door persona. What you see is what you get.
All universities have a lot of work to do with the emergence of AI tools and how these tools are changing our way of working, studying and doing research. Having the library help guide UBC and take part in that is absolutely essential, as well as finding ways to do this sustainably and sensibly. As with all technical revolutions, whether we’re talking about touchtone phones or the Internet or cellular technologies, these were all massive disruptions. And yet we’re still here.
Along with that though, UBC Library’s role is to continue providing students with a sense of place and constancy. I talk a lot about the social contract that people follow when we enter certain spaces like cathedrals, libraries or banks. Libraries are one of those great, very solid social contracts. Allowing students to feel at home in a library is a big part of helping them build a sense of identity and relationship with UBC writ large. I think libraries also play a major role in alumni attachment to universities.
For me, the vision and the mission for the library are inextricably linked. The mission doesn’t change every five years, and it’s not subject to brainstorming exercises and committee research. Libraries have a very specific mission, so how do we best realize that mission in the world in which we currently find ourselves?
I have this very strong desire to see that UBC Library live its name, meaning it is one library, UBC Library. It can have many manifestations, many points of contact, but we are cohesive in how we work as an organization. There’s a lot of cross-organizational work that already goes on, and I would like to see it increase.
Big institutions that have strong reputations are often the slowest ships to pivot because they’re so successful. But there are things that we need to do as research libraries that are bold and strategic to keep up, remain relevant, and provide value to our institutions. UBC Library should be recognized for those kinds of actions.
“Allowing students to feel at home in a library is a big part of helping them build a sense of identity and relationship with UBC writ large.”
Finally, there are people at UBC Library who are already known as national leaders, and there needs to be more visibility for their expertise. I think a lot of my job, as a person who travels on behalf of the library, is to be aware of what’s happening and to bring those opportunities back to UBC, so we can put our hand up as an institution to get people involved. And I really enjoy doing that.
I don’t think many people know that I’m a ballet dancer. Ballet is a big part of my life outside of work. I’ve got a very consistent practice. I put a lot of time, a lot of energy into ballet. I discovered it much later in life, but I like it because it’s a permanent beginner mindset. Ballet is not the place you go if you want self-affirmation. It’s the place you go if you want constant critique: gentle, kind, well-meant critique, but nothing is ever “great.” It’s always just something you can work on. And I think that’s a good thing to do as one gets older and more assured in their ways, to challenge that complacency.
I also laugh a lot. People who know me and have conversations with me know that I enjoy bringing humour to our work.
Users are currently are unable to access Refinitiv. https://guides.library.ubc.ca/az/refinitiv-workspace
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Illustration by Vicki Hamilton, courtesy of Pixabay
A persistent identifier (PID) is a unique code that identifies and links an entity (a person, place, or thing) across global digital infrastructures. PIDs are important to digital repositories like cIRcle because they support long-term identification and accessibility, directing a user to a source location for that entity. Especially in research, this helps with citation consistency and accuracy. Depending on the kind of PID, they can also facilitate broad indexing of material across platforms for users to discover and possibly (re-)use.
There are different kinds of PIDs for different entities:
The inclusion of PIDs support cIRcle’s goals of making UBC scholarly material accessible for the long-term to support teaching, learning, and research. cIRcle applies a variety of object-level PIDs for each item. To demonstrate this further, let’s take a look at Standing in the Doorway : Representations and Realities of Punjabi International Students in Canada in cIRcle, co-authored by Lisa Brunner (Research Associate, Centre for Migration Studies).
Upon deposit to cIRcle, digital objects are assigned a Handle, which directs the user to an object’s location using a URL. This is found in the item’s metadata field.
Additionally, UBC-hosted DOIs are generated for the item in cIRcle. This is found in the DOI metadata field and is also visible on the right side of the item’s record page, beneath “Permanent URL (DOI)”.
A newly deposited item may have a visible UBC-hosted DOI that doesn’t yet resolve (i.e. direct a user to the item). This is because UBC-hosted DOIs are activated weekly. If you’ve recently deposited an item to cIRcle and the UBC-hosted DOI doesn’t resolve within a week, please contact the cIRcle Office.
cIRcle metadata also captures existing DOIs that have been assigned from a publisher, found in the Publisher DOI metadata field. Unlike Handles and UBC-hosted DOIs, not all cIRcle items will have a Publisher DOI; these are only found for items where a publisher-issued DOI was previously assigned (such as a journal article).
If you would like to learn more about PIDs, you can review the Scholaris Metadata and Discovery Expert Group’s (S-MDEG) Briefing Document on Persistent Identifiers. You may also consider reviewing the Canadian National Strategy for PIDs (a collaboration between the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CKRN) and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada), which is part of an effort to support and promote the implementation of PIDs in Canada.
If you are interested to learn more about PIDs and its impact on research, you can check out this recording of a prior US/CA PIDs Community Call: PIDs for increasing research visibility and representation. Additionally, the session Better Data, Lower Burden, Higher Impact: the Value of Persistent Identifiers Across the Research Ecosystem from CKRN’s 2025 virtual conference may be of interest.
If you are a UBC faculty, student, or staff member and want to ensure your research and/or teaching outputs are assigned PIDs and be will available for the long-term, please review cIRcle’s Submissions page or Contact Us.
UBC Library invites students from UBC Vancouver campus to join the 2026/2027 Library Student Advisory Committee (LSAC). If you’re interested in providing a student perspective on library spaces, services, programs and collections, we’d love to hear from you!
The LSAC is a focus group for the library that helps us gather student feedback on specific topics brought to the group by our librarians and library staff. LSAC members help UBC Library learn about current student needs so the library can plan its services accordingly.
We invite up to ten new members to join the LSAC every year. We welcome all current undergraduate and graduate students on UBC Vancouver campus to apply online by October 23.
Learn more about the program on our website!
TW: Colonization, Residential schools
This week Truth and Reconciliation is top of mind, prompting reflection on how Indigenous history, including records about residential schools and Survivors, are represented within Open Collections.
BC’s history is a major area of focus for the Digitization Centre, and Open Collections includes a large number of records showcasing this history, including those in the prominent Uno Langmann, Chung, and Lind Collections. These are valuable pieces of local heritage, but are also inextricably linked to the history of colonization and suppression of Indigenous culture.
Photographs of Indigenous people taken by settlers were often extractive. While they visually preserve valuable elements of cultural heritage like traditional dress and craftsmanship, records often lack meaningful information about the subjects of the photos. There has traditionally been a focus on preserving information about the origin and ownership of archival records, which can lead to a loss of information about Indigenous cultural context.
Open Collections contains records related to residential schools, which need to be treated with particular sensitivity. Below is one of the residential school photographs from the collection that shows only the exterior of the building, but other photographs are of children who attended. It is important to not erase this history, but trauma-informed practice could help guide the description and organization of these records to minimize harm to Survivors and other community members. For instance, consistent use of subject headings could help identify materials related to residential schools, whether someone is seeking those records or wanting to avoid them.
Preserving original information and descriptions, while balancing the need for updated language and additional context can be complex. Creating new standards for terminology and updating metadata for this volume of records takes time. There have been efforts taken to update descriptions, particularly harmful terminology, within some of the collections that have been digitized. However, this is a work in progress; in collections like the Uno Langmann Collection, you will notice some records use the term “Indigenous,” while others still use outdated language that is largely considered offensive.
It is important to consider how colonial perspectives and terminology effect Indigenous researchers, students, and community members who interact with these collections, and inform or limit historical understanding. The addition of contextual statements, like this one below from the landing page of the Uno Langmann Family collection in Open Collections, aim to mitigate these issues:
The Uno Langmann Family of BC Historical Photographs Collection contains harmful racist terminology, imagery and content reflecting the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples and racialized communities. Examples include materials created by non-Indigenous people and organizations which reflect complex and unique relationships between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous peoples as a shared history developed between their different cultures, races, ethnicities and ways of living. We include this material to document, acknowledge and reflect upon this history, while we recognize that much remains to be done towards reconciliation and justice and inclusion of oppressed peoples.
The purpose of this blog post is not to say that we have it all figured out when it comes to decolonizing our collections, nor to point out every issue. It is an acknowledgment that this is a continual process of learning, reflecting, and taking meaningful steps towards reconciliation with actions.
If you’re interested in exploring Indigenous stories through Open Collections, take a look at these past blog posts about the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people:
Explore the Uno Langmann Family Collection of B.C. Photographs here: https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/langmann
Explore the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection here: https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/chung
Explore the Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection here: https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/plind
References:
Boiteau, J. (2024). Whose provenance? plurality of provenance and the redistribution of archival authority. Archival Science, 24(4), 717-738. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09453-x
Fraser C, Todd Z (2016). Decolonial sensibilities: Indigenous research and engaging with archives in contemporary colonial Canada. L’internationale. https://www.internationaleonline.org/contributions/decolonial-sensibilities-indigenous-research-and-engaging-with-archives-in-contemporary-colonial-canada/generate-pdf
Isbister, C. (2021). Indians in the database: Student relationships with subject headings. Pathfinder: A Canadian Journal for Information Science Students and Early Career Professionals, 2(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.29173/pathfinder38
