What is Arches?

Estimated time: 20 minutes

Overview

Questions

• What is Arches and why should it be used?

Objectives

• Explain the benefits of using Arches.
• Explain the basics of how Arches work.

Introduction

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Put yourself in the shoes of a collector of cards, or of antiques, of old misprinted coins, or rare one-of-a-kind stamps. Physical items of sentimental, cultural or heritage value to yourself or to society. Be it as an individual or group or an organisation dedicated to the collection and documentation of things of value, you would eventually run into the problems of scale attributed to physical collections:

• It is unwieldy to store them, with large museums renting out massive climate-regulated warehouses to store and preserve their massive collection of delicate treasures.

Warehouse for Minnesota History Center

• It is impossible to display much, or even a majority of the collection, due to lack of space in museums proper. For instance, the National History Museum and many other museums in London only displays around 1 percent of their collection, opting to keep the rest of it in storage.

• It becomes nightmarish to sort and curate the collection. Not just identifying items for research, even choosing which artefacts go on display and which remain on the shelf becomes a problem.

This is why many museums, large and small have digital heritage collections, some open to the public like the Louvre, others for administrative and curative use. There are many companies offering digital solutions to digitalising museums, though the cost may be prohibitive to larger museums.

Museu Fonografico Tuneril digital collections. Link to the museum: https://www.facebook.com/MuseuFonoTuneril/

A museum may instead host its own digital heritage, as can be seen above, the Museu Fonografico Tuneril hosts its digital collection on Facebook. But this way of storage may be insufficient for museums that need to store more complex information, to capture the complexities between objects to enhance the experience of browsing through the museum. This is where Arches offers a solution.

What is Arches and Why use it?

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The Arches Project was created as a collaboration between Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund as a low cost digital inventory, focusing on massive customisation and offering modern solutons to heritage research and curation.

Naturally, there are many such technologies on the market offering solutions to digitalising heritage but Arches differs from them as it is open-source. Arches has a international collaborative community passionately working to update and improve the Arches experience for all users. Moreover, documentation of Arches is also available for public access, so anyone interested about Arches can learn more about it and help is available online to construct your own installation of it. Arches also does not charge licensing fees at all. The only necessary cost of Arches is the costs to run the server. This is ideal for small museums, collectors or hobbists to digitalise collections locally or on a server for minimal cost.

In this lesson, we will follow the character of Harry, an avid collector of rare European coins, boasting over 500 unique coins in his inventory. Eying to share his love of old coins and their rich and varied histories to the world, Hans has set up an Arches installation on a server he owns and looks to design and populate his digital collection.

Harry the Coin Collector	EU Coins