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Basics
What are ARKs?
ARKs (Archival Resource Keys) are high-functioning identifiers that lead you to things and to descriptions of those things. For example, this ARK,
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- digital content, such as genealogical records (FamilySearch)
- publisher content (Portico)
- digitized manuscripts (Gallica)
- texts (Internet Archive)
- museum holdings (Smithsonian)
- vocabulary terms (yamz.net, perio.do)
- historical figures (snaccooperative.org)
- datasets, journals, living beings, and more.
ARKs and other identifiers
Why would I use ARKs compared to, for example, DOIs?
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For the purpose of supporting early object development, some distinguishing features of ARKs are that they can be deleted, they can exist with no metadata, and they can exist with any metadata you care to store.
From cradle to grave
Why are ARKs that haven't been "released into the world" easy to delete?
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- ARKs have seen broad adoption in cultural memory institutions – museums, archives, and libraries. There is strong adoption in France and francophone regions.
- DOIs until recently have mostly been known as reliable identifiers for scientific and scholarly literature, when in fact this applies to a subset of DOIs assigned via Crossref. What it means to be a DOI is becoming harder to pin down because DOIs are being assigned to datasets, data management plans, field stations, etc. via DataCite, as well as to movies (eg, "Kung Fu Panda") via EIDR. Having said that, Crossref and DataCite DOIs have been successful in creating tools and services for scholarly publishers.
- PURLs have seen lots of use in identifying metadata vocabulary and ontology terms.
Resolvers
If most ARKs run on their own resolvers, why is there also a global resolver for ARKs?
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