What is Arca?

Arca is a collaborative initiative to support the development and implementation of digital repositories at BC post-secondary institutions.  Arca provides access to post-secondary institutional digital assets and research output via a cross-repository search layer. Participating institutions share a single repository, with individual customized website interfaces providing portals to their own content. Arca houses a broad variety of institutional knowledge, including scholarly material and digital assets such as administrative documents, newsletters, images, multimedia, and audiovisual materials.

Arca is built on Islandora, a Canadian-developed open-source platform currently in use at over 100 public and private institutions worldwide. This shared platform provides post-secondary institutions with open-access repositories for research, theses, and any other digital assets they wish to make available to the wider community.

Which BC post-secondary institutions are participating in Arca?

A list of Arca participating sites is available on the BC ELN website.

For information about participating in Arca, contact the Arca Administrative Centre.

What can I find in Arca?

Each participating institution is responsible for determining what kinds of content will go into their repository. It may include scholarly material and digital assets such as administrative documents, newsletters, images, multimedia, and audiovisual materials. To find out more, contact your institution's library.

You can search each individual institution's content by visiting each individual site (see links above), or you can search across content at all participating sites on the main Arca site: http://arcabc.ca

How can I get my content into Arca?

Contact your institution's library to find out how to get your content into your institution's repository. At present Arca participation is focused on BC post-secondary institutions, however future participation will be expanded beyond the post-secondary sector.

Is all the content in Arca visible to the public?

Although Arca is mainly intended to be an open access repository, each individual institution can determine whether their content will be publicly visible, embargoed or password-protected.

 

For more information about Arca, visit the BC ELN website.