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BCHDP-Arca Hosting Service

Are you...

  • thinking of or in the process of applying for a BC History Digitization Program grant?
  • considering using the Arca repository to make your digital content available to the public?

If so, the following information may be useful for your grant application and digitizaton project planning.

What is the Arca digital repository?

Arca is BC’s award-winning collaborative digital repository, used by over 50 post-secondary and public libraries, galleries, museums, archives and historical societies. Through shared infrastructure, centralised coordination and a collaborative approach, Arca maximises system efficiencies through centralised licensing, expertise, best practices, and support. Visitors to the Arca repository at https://arcabc.ca can search across free, online digital assets from all participating organisations.

Arca is built on Islandora, a Canadian-developed open-source repository platform. A shared instance of Islandora is hosted in BC at the SFU Cloud Hosting facility. The Arca Administrative Centre, hosted at BC ELN, provides centralized service support and training for all participants.

Digital materials off all kinds can be hosted in Arca, including images, books, newspapers, PDFs, citations, videos and sound recordings. Arca is primarily an open access repository with materials freely available online; however access to specific collections or items can be restricted to certain users or groups of users.

Arca was initially developed with seed-funding from the Ministry of Advanced Education to provide BC post-secondary institutions with access to shared digital repository infrastructure. The Arca Advisory Committee, representative of Arca participants and responsible for oversight of Arca operations, has since extended Arca's mandate beyond the post-secondary sector in order to benefit other BC GLAM sector organisations.

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

What standard metadata schema does Arca use?

Prior to 2025, Arca members and partners were required to use the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) and adhere to the DLF Aquifer Guidelines for Shareable MODS.

Having since migrated to the latest version of Islandora, Arca now offers a flexible metadata framework and does not require the use any single schema. Metadata in Arca is structured using RDF (Resource Description Framework), using fields that can be linked to controlled vocabularies and taxonomies for consistency and interoperability. This structure allows metadata to be expressed or exported in multiple recognized schemas, including Dublin Core, MODS, and DPLAVA.

The Arca Administrative Centre provides guidance and templates to partner organizations for creating or mapping metadata, including recommendations for field selection, controlled vocabularies, and mandatory elements such as title, creator, type, and date.

How will my digitized materials be made available online?

Collections that have been digitized with funding from the BCHDP are eligible for no-cost, fully supported hosting of those materials in Arca, BC's award-winning collaborative digital repository. The BCHDP Arca child site is currently home to collections from 20 organizations across the province.

Content uploaded into Arca that is intended to be openly accessible is freely searchable via an intuitive, user-friendly search interface at https://arcabc.ca. Arca's powerful SOLR indexing and search engine allows your users to search the full-text of newspapers, books and articles, which are automatically OCR'd during upload into Arca.

Collections each have a unique and persistent URL, as does each individual object, making it easy to link to collections or objects from an existing website. Each Arca collection leverages the visibility of all other Arca collections from more than 50 GLAM and post-secondary organisations. Collections also benefit from Arca's standard search engine optimisation, ensuring high placement in Google searches.

How can Arca support my digital preservation plan?

Hosting digital materials in Arca provides an additional access copy of content beyond the archival masters you maintain yourself. Arca access copies are securely stored on SFU's Cloud servers, and backed up as part of SFU Cloud standard backup procedures.

Warning

At this time, neither BC ELN nor Arca offer digital preservation services. As such, the information above is not a sufficient demonstration of your organization's preservation plan in the context of the BCHDP application.