ARCH
ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub) is a platform for building research collections, analyzing them computationally, and generating datasets from terabytes and even petabytes of data. ARCH supports the open publication and preservation of user-generated datasets created from thousands of libraries, archives, and memory organizations worldwide, giving researchers, students, and information professionals the power to study and understand digital collections in new ways.
Interested? Start now!
For pricing and service offering inquiries, please fill out our interest form. Try ARCH anytime by signing up for the free service tier, ARCHWay. For other questions or to talk to ARCH staff, contact us at arch@archive.org.
Features
Build: Curate a research collection for analysis using primary source web, text, and image digital collections.
Access: Generate more than a dozen different datasets (full text, images, pdfs, graph data, etc.) from primary source digital collections with the click of a button. Download generated datasets in-browser or via API.
Analyze: Easily work with research-ready datasets, both through in-browser visualizations in ARCH and in interactive computational tools like Jupyter Notebooks, Google CoLab, Gephi, and Voyant, and others.
Publish and Preserve: Publish datasets with one click on archive.org, where they can be openly accessed and shared. All published datasets are preserved in perpetuity.
Support: Technical support, online training, and extensive help center documentation are all available.
Streamline Data-Driven Research
ARCH leverages the Internet Archive’s non-profit infrastructure and open-source tools to streamline computational use of digital collections. Librarians, collection managers, and educators can provide ARCH to their researchers and students in order to facilitate sophisticated research processes that would otherwise require coding/scripting skills and significant computing resources.
Screenshot of an image search engine for the Artists Websites web archive collection, created by Hugging Face with the ARCH image graph dataset (source).
Publications
Recent research using ARCH software and datasets:
- Digital pioneers: Mormon mommy bloggers and building the “Bloggernacle” (2025)
- Follow the updates! Reconstructing past practices with web archive data (2024)
- Capturing and documenting the wider health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through the Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan Initiative: Protocol for a mixed methods interdisciplinary project (2023)
- Sliding data: Feminist methodologies pathways (2023)
- From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation (2022)
- Protection and distortion: the space-time of born-digital heritage (2022)
Background
ARCH was made possible in part by funding from the Mellon Foundation and via a long-running collaboration with the Archives Unleashed project of the University of Waterloo and York University.
Developing the ARCH platform to support all digital collections is made possible with funding from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.
