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Arca: technology to let your digital assets shine

Are you, or have you been, a recipient of BC History Digitization Program (BCHDP) funding? Do your BCHDP-funded digital assets need a new or alternative home so they can really shine? How does a no-cost, fully supported hosting solution sound? Arca may be the technical solution you are looking for to showcase your digital treasures!

British Columbia’s libraries, museums, archives and galleries with BCHDP-funded materials are eligible for no-cost, fully supported hosting of those materials in Arca, BC’s award-winning collaborative digital repository. This opportunity is made possible by a partnership between the Irving K Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) at the University of British Columbia Library and the BC Electronic Library Network (BC ELN), who share a common goal of supporting access to BC’s remarkable wealth of digital assets.

In Arca, your digital assets would be searchable as a single collection in the BCHDP Arca site, and your images would be beautifully displayed with high-quality, interactive viewers. Your objects would be searchable via SOLR-indexed MODS metadata, each with a persistent identifier for linking to and from external catalogues or webpages.

Your collections would become discoverable via arcabc.ca along with thousands of BC assets from 26 Arca partner organizations, leveraging the visibility of the entire project. In 2017, Arca collections had over 20,000 visits from 160 countries, with 59% of traffic coming from Google searches.

The IKBLC-BC ELN partnership provides BCHDP participants with full support and hosting from the BC ELN-based Arca Administrative Centre from November 2017 to November 2020, including friendly training and personalised front-line support for migrating, configuring and maintaining your collections. Our support is designed to ensure that you can use the repository with minimal investment of time and resources.

Terrace Public Library (TPL) jumped at the opportunity to put their Eleanor Muehle Newspaper Archive into Arca, making this important resource searchable and accessible to their community. “Holy smokes! Looks fantastic! I really like the layout, its sooo much clearer to see what’s available in our collection now – I’m sure patrons are going to love this as well,” said Steve Purita, TPL library technician.

UBC Library’s IKBLC and BC ELN are keen to explore ways that Arca hosting can continue to be an affordable, accessible solution for even the smallest organizations beyond November 2020. Stay tuned!

Curious? Contact us with your questions!

Sunni Nishimura
Coordinator – Partnerships
Arca Administrative Centre
[email protected] / 778-782-6937

Eirian Vining
BCHDP Coordinator
[email protected]
http://ikblc.ubc.ca/initiatives/bcdigitinfo