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Long-term access to objects and items of interest to researchers, scholars, collectors, and others, is notoriously difficult to ensure. People and things move and links rot.
Persistent linking systems are available, but expensive.
And, they those systems impose their own metadata and other requirements, instead of letting users supply their own.
Solution
ARKs exist to provide long-term access to information objects.
ARKs are affordable: there are no fees to assign or use ARKs. And, you can host ARKs on your own web server , because for example, with help from the Noid (Nice Opaque Identifiers) is open open source software.
ARKs are flexible: In some ways, ARKs can be thought of as a “one-size-fits-all,” in that they perfectly fit simple as well as complex use cases.
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