For small organizations looking to apply for BC History Digitization Program (BCHDP) grant funding, this tailored support service is here for you!

Made possible by a partnership between the BC Electronic Library Network (BC ELN) and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), this three-year pilot program is well underway. In its first year, the BC ELN-BCHDP Support Service assisted over 20 small museums, archives, and historical societies across the province, nine of who submitted BCHDP grant applications this round.

Reaching out to organizations with fewer than 3 FT staff or that are volunteer-run, BC ELN leveraged a team of senior staff and library / library technician students to work together with participants to successfully submit these grant applications. From determining copyright permissions to connecting with digitization service providers to hosting content in Arca, the Support Service has a lot to offer!

Learn more about the BC ELN-BCHDP Support Service.

Digitization was completed for two exciting collections that will be appearing in Arca next spring: the Lore Maria Wiener collection of photographs and designer's newsletters from the Society for the Museum of Original Costume, and a large collection of BC Francophone newsletters from the Société historique francophone de la Colombie-Britannique.

Watch for these collections coming soon in the BCHDP-Arca site.

New functionality for the Islandora VideoJS Viewer now makes it possible to display subtitles or transcript on video and audio objects in Arca, making them accessible to a greater number of users. When contributors include an appropriately-coded transcript file, the transcript text will display when users view the object.

The Arca Admin Centre built and launched the Islandora Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels module. This module, originally prototyped in 2019, was rebuilt to work with the newly-launched Local Contexts Hub, a web portal where Indigenous communities can customize the TK and Biocultural (BC) labels. Islandora objects and collections that are registered as Local Contexts projects can display TK and BC labels that are assigned by Indigenous communities. Using these digital markers, Indigenous communities can define how their cultural heritage is accessed and used.

Image: An example of a Traditional Knowledge Label: TK Community Voice. To view labels and learn more, visit Local Contexts' TK Labels page.

All Arca members are now behind firewalls to protect the service against bot attacks. In 2020, Arca set-up Cloudflare to keep sites online during these attacks, but those with custom domains were not able to take advantage of Cloudflare protection; the Admin Centre worked with the remaining sites to ensure they're protected and find ways to adapt workflows where necessary.