About Arca

Arca is a collaborative project of British Columbia post-secondary institutions to provide anytime, anywhere access to research created at BC post-secondary institutions. Arca is a province-wide network of digital repositories that:

provides access to faculty and student research output across multiple post-secondary institutions via a cross-repository search layer;
supports the management of institutional digital assets;
showcases BC as a hub for knowledge creation across Canada and around the world.

Arca is powered by 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.

Arca is made possible by a partnership between the British Columbia Electronic Library Network (BC ELN) and Charlottetown, PEI-based software firm discoverygarden, supported by a grant from the Ministry of Advanced Education.

In Phase 1, the Pilot Implementation stage of the Project Implementation Plan, seven early adopters worked with BC ELN to implement and test the repositories in beta. Upon completion of a successful beta launch in October 2015, a call-out for additional participants took place. Three additional sites joined Arca in January 2016.

Phase 2 of the project will see the development of a cross-repository search layer, enabling users to search across not only Arca repositories but those at other BC post-secondary institutions with existing repositories e.g. UBC's cIRcle, SFU's Summit, University of Victoria's UVicSpace,KPU's KORA, Vancouver Island University's VIUSpace, etc..

Arca participating sites are:

ECUAD

About Arca