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ARK (Archival Resource Key) identifiers are widely used for objects and abstractions related to scientific and scholarly heritage. ARKs were developed at the US National Library of Medicine and the California Digital Library (CDL) especially, but not exclusively, for the library, archive and museum community. Their built-in flexibility and ease-of-use has proven popular with researchers and scholars across all academic disciplines, as well as government, commercial and nonprofit sectors. Indeed, over 550 500 institutions across the world have registered to use ARKs, conservatively estimated to number 175 million3.2 billion.

CDL and DuraSpace launched this pilot project as a first step toward ensuring the ongoing health and development of the ARK infrastructure. By “ARK infrastructure,” we mean open source software tools and systems, the ARK specification, and production-grade resolver services for N2T.net (Name-to-Thing, a generic resolver for over 600 identifier types and also the global ARK resolver). ARKs represent the only major mainstream persistent identifier scheme that is truly open, decentralized, non-siloed, and non-paywalled. Community ownership of this infrastructure has been under discussion for over a decade, and the project makes a start by establishing an active ARK community group with the aims of

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• Talk with us (and each other) via the ARKs forum/mailing list
• Fill out an Expression of Interest form
• Give us feedback on our Project Vision
• Learn more about ARKs

Timeline

Advisory Group

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What we're working on now

• Populating the working groups: 1) technical, 2) outreach, and 3) sustainability
• Reviewing and iterating on our pitch
• Defining a governance model
• Defining a financial model

Longer Term - working on these soon!

• Develop procedures for shared maintenance of the organizational registry and the resolver

Technical Working Group

Short Term

• Planning Finishing work on the ARK IETF specificationConsult with the ARK specification team
• Broadening NAAN organizational registry maintenance beyond just CDL

Longer Term

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• Guiding the ARK specification through the IETF Informational RFC process
• Work with the Outreach Working Group to implement mechanisms to measure ARK usage

Outreach Working Group

Short term 

• Reviewing an ARK community survey draft created by Bibliothèque nationale de FranceCombining second round survey begun by the Sustainability WG
• Clearly articulating how ARKs can be used, why they are essential (the “value proposition”), and implementing a plan to promote their adoption and use
• Developing a process to gather requirements, priorities, and models for shared community and infrastructure management

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