Heritage records you can still trust years later
Arches is the open source heritage platform, jointly funded by the World Monument Fund and the Getty Conservation Institute. We do the migration, data modelling, hosting and long-term support around it, for organisations whose records cannot be recreated. We are registered Arches providers and actively contribute to the platform we deploy.
Already on Arches, or still deciding?
If you already use Arches: you know what it is. What you probably want to know is what we do around it. Data modelling, migration at scale, custom workflows, dashboards built around your actual business processes, integration with the systems either side, and hosting with a support channel that answers.
If your records live in a database only one person understands: the platform is not the first question. What you hold, what state it is in and whether Arches is the right answer at all comes first. That is a conversation we are happy to have honestly, including when the answer is no.
Where we usually come in
Most conversations start from one of these:
Records spread across ageing databases, spreadsheets and shared drives, with no single reliable version
A database that has outgrown itself, or that only one person understands
A migration that has to happen without losing a single record, and without pausing day-to-day work
A small team with no dedicated IT, needing something that keeps working without constant attention
Sensitive site locations that need genuine access control, not just a login screen
Obligations to connect to national registers, planning systems or funder requirements
A grant-funded project that will end, and records that need to survive it
Reluctance to change a process that currently works is reasonable, not an obstacle. A migration that disrupts the team it is meant to help has failed, whatever the data says.
The part that matters is the part you cannot see
You already know your records. What tends to go wrong is underneath them.
The data model has to fit how your organisation works, not fight it. Provenance has to hold, so a record can still be traced back years later. And something entered today has to be findable and trustworthy decades from now, by someone who never met the person who entered it.
That is the work. The platform is how we do it, not what we are selling.
Selected work
A national historic environment record
A long-term migration programme for a public sector body, moving all current and historic heritage data into a customised Arches HER instance. More than 200,000 records, moved without data loss. Site visits, workshops and detailed data modelling on the human side; Kubernetes on the technical side.
Tomorrow’s Cities
Arches deployed and hosted as the data repository for a large cross-disciplinary research programme on urban policy and disaster risk, spanning institutions in Scotland, Nepal, Kenya and Turkey, with UKRI-compliant data management. This meant interviewing social scientists and geologists alike to arrive at one shared set of requirements.
London Science Museum
We extended Arches’ Bulk Data Manager so that users could edit, flag and bulk-upload data themselves, and are contributing that work back into the wider Arches codebase.
A state government heritage register
A public-facing heritage register delivered for a state government department, now live and in daily public use.
Named references available on request.
Arches is free. So why us?
What is not free is moving twenty years of records into it without losing anything. Neither is the data model that has to reflect how your organisation works. Nor are the integrations, the hosting, or someone who answers in year three when the person who set it up has moved on.
Registered Arches providers. We work directly with the Arches core team, and we ran the workshops that produced a roadmap for integrating Arches with modern DevOps practice.
We hosted the international Arches developer meetup at Belfast Castle in April 2025.
We contribute back. Improvements built for one organisation go upstream wherever they can.
We have worked at national scale and at small-team scale. What a 200,000-record national register needs is not what a small record office needs.
Your data stays yours
Arches is open source. Your records sit in an open standard, on a platform you could run yourself or hand to another supplier. We publish the schema and integration work openly wherever we can. Nothing we build requires our continued involvement in order to keep working.
Sensitive location data is treated as sensitive: as open as possible, as closed as necessary.
Start with what you already have
No commitment, and no assumption that Arches is the answer. One call covers what you hold, what state it is in, and whether Arches is the right answer at all.