Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ARCHE)

Overview

ARCHE (A Resource Centre for the HumanitiEs) is a certified digital repository for humanities research data, operated by the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The repository provides stable, persistent hosting and open dissemination of digital research data and resources for the Austrian and international humanities research community.

History and Founding

ARCHE was established as the successor to the CLARIN Centre Vienna / Language Resources Portal (CCV/LRP), which was initiated in 2014. The ACDH-CH itself was founded in 2015 as an evolution of the predecessor Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology (ICLTT). ARCHE has held the CoreTrustSeal—a certification for trustworthy digital repositories—since 2017.

Collections and Holdings

ARCHE's collections span a broad range of humanities disciplines. In addition to extensive language resources—including dictionaries, Arabic corpora (covering Algerian Saharan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Mesopotamian Arabic, North Levantine Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic), and audio recordings—the repository holds documentation archives from archaeological surveys, 3D scans of ancient objects, TEI-annotated historical data, parliamentary protocols, and born-digital data from the Digital Humanities. The repository is particularly strong in Austrian literary and historical material.

Standards and Infrastructure

All metadata in ARCHE is freely available under a CC0 licence. Metadata conforms to a dedicated OWL-described schema and is accessible via an OAI-PMH endpoint in multiple formats, including CMDI (for CLARIN harvesting). Persistent identifiers (Handle) are assigned to all archived resources. ARCHE uses Dspace-based infrastructure and supports IIIF standards where applicable. It is a certified CLARIN B-centre.

Access and Usage

ARCHE is freely accessible at arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at. Depositors work with ARCHE's curators through an advised deposit process that includes data quality checks, metadata enrichment, and format migration. All data is intended for open dissemination, and diverse preview and download options are provided for different file types.