The ARK Alliance community comprises institutions and people who use or assign
ARK identifiers as well as those interested in promoting ARKs and sustaining
the open ARK infrastructure, which consists of standards, best practices, the
N2T.net resolver, and the registry of ARK organizations. There is also an
ARK Community Code of Conduct.
Global distribution of over 1000 ARK organizations.
The ARK Alliance emerged from a collaboration between the California Digital
Library and DuraSpace/LYRASIS. Launched in 2018, it has gained the support of
43 institutions. Since 2021 the ARK Alliance has been a member of the
NDSA, an international consortium committed to the long-term preservation of
digital information.
How to get involved
- Join a discussion group (in English) or 🇫🇷 liste de discussion
(francophone)
- Follow the ARK Alliance on twitter @arks_org
- Follow us on mastodon @arks_org@fosstodon.org
- Read the ARK Alliance blog
- Sign up for our newsletter
- Submit a community news item or blog post using this online form
- Tell us about yourself by filling out a 5-minute ARK survey (in English)
or 🇫🇷 une enquête ARK (version française)
- Tell us about your interest in helping with the work of the ARK Alliance
- Contact us about joining a working group: Outreach, Registry,
Technical, Advisory
Who is creating ARKs
Since 2001 over 1000 organizations across the world registered to assign
ARKs. The registry includes national and university libraries and archives,
art museums, natural history museums, publishers, data centers, government
agencies, vendors, and research labs. To register your organization, fill out
this online request form.
What ARKs are being assigned to (February 2023):
- genealogical records (8 billion FamilySearch)
- publisher content (100 million Portico)
- scanned texts (30 million Internet Archive)
- scientific records (22 million INIST)
- bibliographic records (27 million BnF main catalog)
- museum specimens (11 million going on 100 million Smithsonian)
- public health documents, many from legal discovery (15 million UCSF IDL)
- digitized documents and objects (6 million BnF Gallica)
- historical persons, families, and organizations (4 million SNACC)
- finding aids and special collections (4 million Merritt)
- library and archival objects (1.3 million Durham University Library)
- educational resources (1.1 million University of Utah)
- fine art (483,000 Louvre museum)
- historic maps (334,000 Princeton University Libraries)
- vocabulary terms (27,000 Periodo, YAMZ)
- datasets, journals, archeological artifacts, living beings, etc.
We continue to receive expressions of interest and have attracted support from the following 43
institutions on 4 continents:
- Australian National Data Service
- Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg
- The British Library
- Caltech (California Institute of Technology)
- City University of New York
- Colectica
- Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas – Argentina
- Crossref
- DaSCH, Swiss National Data & Service Center for the Humanities
- DeSci Labs
- ENIP – Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit
- Family Search International
- HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de
Genève
- Indiana University
- Institut Internationale de la Marionnette
- Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
- Internet Archive
- Max Planck Institute for Art History – Bibliotheca Hertziana
- National Center for Atmospheric Research
- National University of Ireland, Galway
- Penn State University
- Portico
- Sempiternelia
- Service interministériel des Archives de France
- Smithsonian Institution
- Texas A&M University Libraries
- Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
- University College Dublin
- University of Arizona
- University of California, San Francisco
- University of Chicago
- University of Houston Libraries
- University of Illinois at Chicago
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- University of Maryland
- University of North Texas
- University of Pennsylvania Libraries
- University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute
- University of Utah
- University of Virginia
- Zürcher Hochschule der Künste