2001  John Kunze publishes the first ARK specification and the NAAN registry

2004  John makes the first public ARK resolver (noid.cdlib.org) available on the Internet and shares the code base

2006  ARK resolver renamed N2T.net per a vision of community ownership, starts doing compact identifiers

2009  CDL helps found DataCite to promote the use of DOIs

2010  CDL releases EZID as a fee-based, partial cost-recovery service supporting both ARKS & DataCite DOIs

2010-2016  CDL (Joan Starr) grows the EZID service to 120 clients globally with a goal to achieve full cost-recovery

2015  Blog post on principles of open scholarly infrastructure (Bilder, Lin, Neylon) re-affirms community vision

2016  DataCite announces intention to change their fee structure and introduce service fees to EZID based on volume of activity

2017  CDL approaches DuraSpace to consider the viability of an open-source project/community for ARKs

2018  The ARKsInTheOpen.org project launches