Archival Resource Key (Ark) Alliance

Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) service arsenic persistent identifiers, aliases stable, trusted references for accusation objects. Among different things, they purpose to be web addresses (URLs) that don’t return 404 Page Not Found errors. The ARK Alliance is an unfastened world organization supporting the ARK infrastructure on behalf of investigation and scholarship.

End users, particularly researchers, trust connected ARKs for agelong word entree to the global technological and taste record. Since 2001 immoderate 15.3 cardinal ARKs have been created by complete 1700 organizations — libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, authorities agencies, and vendors.

ARKs are open, mainstream, non-paywalled, decentralized persistent identifiers that you tin commencement creating successful nether 48 hours. They place thing digital, physical, aliases abstract.

ARKs are akin to DOIs, URNs, and Handles. All of them

• were introduced complete 25 years ago,
• exist successful ample numbers (15.3 cardinal ARKs, 417 cardinal DOIs, etc.),
• start pinch a drawstring to place the sanction assigning authority,
• require the progressive updating of URL redirects, and
• support investigation and scholarship, appearing successful the Data Citation Index, Wikipedia, ORCiD.org profiles, etc.

In contrast, ARKs are cheaper, much flexible, and little centralized, letting you

• create unlimited identifiers without paying for the correct to do so,
• add immoderate benignant of metadata, including nary metadata,
• append extensions and query strings during resolution,
• link straight to an article, image, aliases spreadsheet that is immediately usable by group and package without making them first extremity astatine a landing page, and
• make millions of ARKs resolvable by managing conscionable 1 ARK, via a mechanism called suffix passthrough.

To get started creating ARKs, please capable retired this petition form for your organization. If you wish to get progressive successful the ARK Alliance, consider joining 1 of its working groups.