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First you need a NAAN (Name Assigning Authority Number), which is a number reserved exclusively for your organization. It will must appear in every ARK your organization assigns, just after the "ark:/" label. The NAAN in all of these ARKs,
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https://n2t.net/ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29
is 12148, and it uniquely identifies the French National Library. There is no charge to obtain or use a NAAN, and you can request one by filling out an online form. Over 500 organizations have NAANs – libraries, archives, museums, university departments, government agencies, scholarly and educational publishers, etc. – all listed in the public NAAN registry.
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To anything digital, physical, abstract. That can include things that don't yet exist but that you need to reference from objects that you're in the process of creating or planning, such as a link from a draft article to a dataset under preparation, or a link from an archived digital letter to a planned finding aid.
One caveat caution is that you should generally assign ARKs to things that you own, control, or manage. Assigning ARKs to things you don't control is discouraged because such identifiers tend to be fragile.
How do I create the character strings that become ARKs?
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You may assign ARKs using strings that you invent or generate (mint) at the moment of assignment or that leverage existing identifiers. have create construct any ARK strings you wish, provided they start with your NAAN The character strings used to construct ARKs are made of digits, letters (without diacritics), and a few extra characters xxx ref. Generally people concerned with persistence chBy themselves, persistent have many options, depending on your priorities. The strings that form your ARKs may be opaque, non-opaque, or a bit of both. Persistent identifier strings are often opaque, revealing deliberately revealing little about what they identify ( because non-opaque identifiers do not age or travel well). . Examples of a range of strings:
| non-opaque | French National Library | Netscape.Permanent.Archive | The_Gay_Divorcee_1934_April_1 |
| opaque-ish | bnf.fr | btv1b8449691v/f29 | TGD/1934/04/01 |
| opaquer | bnf | 12148/btv1b8449691v/f29 | 19340401 |
| opaquest | 12148 | btv1b8449691v | f29 |
But opaque identifiers are difficult because they give you no clues as to what the identifiers were meant to identify. In the absence of metadata you are forced to access the object itself to remind yourself what it is, and to trust that it's the correct object. Metadata really helps.
xxx opaque, non-opaque
You may assign ARKs using strings that you invent or generate (mint) at the moment of assignment or that leverage existing identifiers. have create construct any ARK strings you wish, provided they start with your NAAN The character strings used to construct ARKs are made of digits, letters (without diacritics), and a few extra characters xxx ref. Generally people concerned with persistence ch identify. In the absence of metadata you are forced to access the object itself to remind yourself what it is, and to trust that it's the correct object. Metadata really helps.
inventing new strings (uuid, noid, counters, dates), leveraging existing strings (eg, museum ids)
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Serving ARKs is like serving URLs. Normally incoming URL strings address (get mapped to) content that your web server returns. If your server is ARK-aware, incoming ARKs (expressed as URLs) must be mapped to the same content. A common approach is to map the ARK to the URL using a software table that you update whenever the URL changes. In this case your server is acting as a local resolver. That means that you will advertise your URL-based ARKs rooted at your own resolver's hostname. If you don't want to implement this yourself, there are ARK software tools and services that can help.
Another approach is to run your web server without change, but instead of updating local tables, you update ARK-to-URL mapping tables residing at a non-local resolver. Examples of this approach can be found in any organization that uses an API/UI to update tables residing at the n2t.net resolver via ezid.cdlib.org.
xxx
nstead of update ARK If you choose to run your own ARK infrastructure, you get complete autonomy at the expense of maintaining a server/resolver. On the one hand, you might run all custom infrastructure – including content management, web hosting, minting (generating unique identifier strings), and running your own server/resolver. That infrastructure could be very simple, such as server configured to map incoming ARK-based URLs to server file pathnames. When you request your NAAN you will be asked to supply the base URL of your local server or resolver.
At the other extreme, you might work with a vendor that supplies all the infrastructure so that, for example, you can focus on creating content. Hybrid solutions are also common, such as just taking your current web server arrangement and just adding an identifier management piece (eg, the API/UI provided by ezid.cdlib.org, which partners with n2t.net).
You will also want to think about whether to advertise (release, publish, disseminate) your ARKs based at your resolver or at n2t.net. You might choose the former for branding or the latter for stability. Resolving your ARKs through n2t.net is always possible, regardless of how you advertise them (this is a side-effect of obtaining a NAAN).
to anything digital, physical, abstract, etc. This often includes things that don't yet exist but that you need to reference from objects that you're in the process of creating or planning, such as a link from a draft article to a dataset under preparation, or a link from an archival object to a planned finding aid.
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One caveat is that you should generally assign ARKs to things that you own, control, or manage. ARKs, or any identifiers, that you assign to things you don't control will tend to be fragile.
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Yes, ARKs can be assigned at any level of granularity, such as to a manuscript, to chapters inside it, to chapter sections, subsections, etc. An ARK can also be assigned to a thing that encloses other things. In ARKs the character '/' is reserved to help the recipient understand about containment, for example, the first ARK below contains the second ARK:
ark ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v
ark ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29
That's the containment qualifier. There's only one other ARK qualifier, and it indicates variant forms of a thing by using the reserved character '.' in front of a suffix. For example, if these ARKs identify documents,
ark ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29.pdf
ark ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29.html
because they differ only by the suffix .pdf or .html, it can be inferred that they identify two different forms of the same document.
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ThereHere's a partial list of software tools for persistent identification that includes
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