The IR that will be the object of our case study is cIRcle of the University of British Columbia (UBC). As stated in the brochure publicizing it to the UBC faculty and students, cIRcle assembles various communities and collections. Communities are UBC departments, labs, research centres, schools and other administrative units. Within cIRcle, each community oversees one or more of its own collections, which contain items submitted to the IR. As currently envisioned, cIRcle's operational goal is to be able to accept, preserve indefinitely and provide continued readability and accessibility to virtually all published and unpublished digital objects created in any file format by or on behalf of the University, its faculty, staff or students, including preprints and postprints of academic journal articles, other items such as theses, dissertations, departmental publications, technical reports, bulletins, conference proceedings, course notes and other learning objects, and raw research data.