Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to a few frequently-asked questions. This list will grow and change over time, based on questions that come up when people begin using KORA.
If you have questions about copyright, please see our page dedicated to Copyright.
Please email the KORA team if your question isn’t answered here! If you’d like to speak to someone about KORA, please call Karen Meijer-Kline, the KORA administrator at 604-599-2978.
- What is Arca?
- Which BC post-secondary institutions are participating in Arca?
- What can I find in Arca?
- Is all the content in Arca visible to the public?
- I don't have electronic versions of old working papers that I'd like to include in the repository. Is it okay to scan the printed page to a PDF file?
- How do I revise a submission?
- Can I post related files (sound clips, data sets, etc.) alongside the published article?
- Can I post a reprint from a journal?
- A working paper in our repository site has been published in a slightly revised form in a journal. What should I do?
Arca is a collaborative initiative to support the development and implementation of digital repositories at BC post-secondary institutions. Arca provides access to post-secondary institutional digital assets and research output via a cross-repository search layer. Participating institutions share a single repository, with individual customized website interfaces providing portals to their own content. Arca houses a broad variety of institutional knowledge, including scholarly material and digital assets such as administrative documents, newsletters, images, multimedia, and audiovisual materials.
Arca is built on 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.
Which BC post-secondary institutions are participating in Arca?
A list of Arca participating sites is available on the BC ELN website.
For information about participating in Arca, contact the Arca Administrative Centre.
Each participating institution is responsible for determining what kinds of content will go into their repository. It may include scholarly material and digital assets such as administrative documents, newsletters, images, multimedia, and audiovisual materials. To find out more, contact your institution's library.
You can search each individual institution's content by visiting each individual site (see links above), or you can search across content at all participating sites on the main Arca site: http://arcabc.ca
Is all the content in Arca visible to the public?
Although Arca is mainly intended to be an open access repository, each individual institution can determine whether their content will be publicly visible, embargoed or password-protected.
For more information about Arca, visit the BC ELN website.
I don't have electronic versions of old working papers that I'd like to include in the repository. Is it okay to scan the printed page to a PDF file?
Yes--scanning printed pages is a great way to create PDF files for inclusion in the repository. There are two ways to scan a page: using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) or scanning the page as an image. Making OCR scans requires careful proofreading and loses the original formatting of the documents. Image scans cannot be searched. The best solution takes advantage of both of these methods. Many software applications allow for the OCR capture of image scans. When documents are scanned this way, users see the image scan but search the full-text of the document. This is the preferred method for scanning documents for the repository.
To revise a submission that has been posted to the repository, contact the repository administrator with the new version.
How can I submit a multi-part file, such as multiple chapters for a book?
nb. this section is being worked on.
Can I post related files (sound clips, data sets, etc.) alongside the published article?
nb. this section is being worked on.
Can I post a reprint from a journal?
It depends on what the journal allows, which is usually specified in their agreement with the author. If it would not violate copyright to post the reprint on your repository site, you're welcome to do so. Permissions for many publishers can be found at SHERPA RoMEO.
A working paper in our repository site has been published in a slightly revised form in a journal. What should I do?
Many journals do not have any restrictions on working papers that preceded an article, especially if substantial revisions were made. You should check your author agreement with the journal to confirm that there is no problem with leaving the working paper on the site. The repository would constitute noncommercial use.
Assuming the working paper does remain on posted in the repository, it is a good idea to include the citation to the published article on the cover page of the repository working paper. Please contact the repository administrator to request this change.