In 2018 the California Digital Library (CDL) and DuraSpace announced a collaboration aimed at building an open, international community around Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) and their use as persistent identifiers in the open scholarly ecosystem.
Over 550 institutions (research, not-for-profit, private, government) across the world have registered to use ARKs. They’ve created an estimated 175 million ARKs with publicly resolvable links to objects (digital, physical, people, places, etc.).
Since 2001, CDL has served as the incubator for ARK infrastructure, consisting primarily of the specification, a registry of organizations using ARKs, and a global resolver service. Now, to achieve long-term sustainability, the ARK infrastructure must emerge from CDL and mature in partnership with multiple organizations and community participants to guide its future.
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