Expanding ARCH project include
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 8:52 am
We are pleased to announce that ARCH recently received funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), via their National Leadership Grants program, supporting ARCH expansion. The project, “Expanding ARCH: Equitable Access to Text and Data Mining Services,” entails two broad areas of work.
First, the project will create user-informed workflows and conduct software development that enables a diverse set of partner libraries, archives, and museums to add digital collections of any format (e.g., image collections, text collections) to ARCH for users to study via computational analysis.
Working with these partners will help ensure that ARCH can support the needs of organizations of any size that aim to make their digital collections available in new ways. Second, the project will work with phone number database librarians and scholars to expand the number and types of data analysis jobs and resulting datasets and data visualizations that can be created using ARCH, including allowing users to build custom research collections that are aggregated from the digital collections of multiple institutions.
Expanding the ability for scholars to create aggregated collections and run new data analysis jobs, potentially including artificial intelligence tools, will enable ARCH to significantly increase the type, diversity, scope, and scale of research it supports.
Collaborators on the a set of institutional partners that will be closely involved in guiding functional requirements, testing designs, and using the newly-built features intended to augment researcher support. Primary institutional partners include University of Denver, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Williams College Museum of Art, and Indianapolis Museum of Art, with additional institutional partners joining in the project’s second year.
First, the project will create user-informed workflows and conduct software development that enables a diverse set of partner libraries, archives, and museums to add digital collections of any format (e.g., image collections, text collections) to ARCH for users to study via computational analysis.
Working with these partners will help ensure that ARCH can support the needs of organizations of any size that aim to make their digital collections available in new ways. Second, the project will work with phone number database librarians and scholars to expand the number and types of data analysis jobs and resulting datasets and data visualizations that can be created using ARCH, including allowing users to build custom research collections that are aggregated from the digital collections of multiple institutions.
Expanding the ability for scholars to create aggregated collections and run new data analysis jobs, potentially including artificial intelligence tools, will enable ARCH to significantly increase the type, diversity, scope, and scale of research it supports.
Collaborators on the a set of institutional partners that will be closely involved in guiding functional requirements, testing designs, and using the newly-built features intended to augment researcher support. Primary institutional partners include University of Denver, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Williams College Museum of Art, and Indianapolis Museum of Art, with additional institutional partners joining in the project’s second year.