A Phased Approach
Foundational to the creation of the BCDL is the Arca project. Arca is a collaborative initiative to support the development and implementation of digital repositories at BC post-secondary institutions. Arca is a province-wide network of institutional 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.
The West Beyond the West portal has influenced aspects of the BCDL discussion. This portal provided free and open access to British Columbia’s digitized historical collections as a scoped search of Canadiana.org. The portal has now been decommissioned; the collections from West Beyond the West continue to be available through Canadiana.org and member websites.The BC Digitization Coalition website archive captures the early work of the coalition with regards to early digitization initiatives in British Columbia.