The concept of ARKs grew out of identifier work begun in 1992 in the newly formed IETF URI working group as it was trying to finalize the URL specification in the face of what seemed like a fatal flaw, namely, the high rate at which URLs were observed to be breaking. In the push to standardize the URL, the problem of broken links came to be defined as out of scope, becoming instead a job that the IETF URN effort would address by formalizing a scheme that used indirect identifiers. By 1998, four such schemes (Handle, URN, PURL, and DOI), all based on native URL redirection, claimed to provide persistent identifiers.
The ARK spec was publised from CDL...
The first ARK implementation was in 200? ...
In 2006 the BnF adopted the ARK, with the result that many French institutions later adopted it....