What ARKs are and why you would use them
Archival Resource Key (ARK) identifiers are persistent URLs designed to support long-term access to information objects. Introduced in 2001, ARK identifiers were designed to identify objects of any type:
- digital objects – documents, databases, images, software, websites, etc.
- physical objects – books, bones, statues, etc.
- living beings and groups – people, animals, companies, orchestras, etc.
- intangible objects – places, chemicals, diseases, vocabulary terms, performances, etc.
ARKs are assigned for a variety of reasons:
- affordability – there are no fees to assign or use ARKs
- self-sufficiency – you can host ARKs on your own web server, eg, Noid (Nice Opaque Identifiers) open source software portability – you can move ARKs to other servers without losing their core identities
- global resolvability – you can host ARKs at a well-known server, eg, at the N2T.net (Name-to-Thing) resolver
- density – ARKs handle mixed case, permitting shorter identifiers (CD, Cd, cD, cd are all distinct)
Some advantages of ARKs:
- simplicity – access relies only on mainstream web “redirects” and ordinary “get” requests
- utility – with “inflections” (different endings), an ARK should access data , metadata, promises, and more
- compatibility – inflections don’t conflict with “linked data content negotiation” (a harder and limited way to access metadata)
- versatility – ARKs support persistence statements to describe different kinds of long-term access
- transparency – no identifier can guarantee stability, and ARK inflections help users make informed judgements
- visibility – syntax rules make ARKs easy to extract from texts and to compare for variant and containment relationships
- openness – unlike other persistent identifiers, ARKs don’t lock you into one specific, fee-based management and resolution infrastructure
- impact – ARKs appear in the Data Citation Index ℠ and in ORCID researcher profiles
ARKs, identifiers and persistent identifiers (PIDs)
The type of a URL-based identifier can often be spotted by how the URL starts, but that’s not true for ARKs, which are spotted by an internal “ark:” label that comes after the URL hostname. For example, here is an ARK,
https://n2t.net/ark:/67531/metadc107835/
that gets you to a dissertation. ARKs are high-functioning identifiers that lead you to things and to descriptions of those things. For example, adding ‘?’ on the end of the above ARK should get you to its description:
https://n2t.net/ark:/67531/metadc107835/?
A common internet identifier is a URL, or part of a URL. For example, this core ARK identifier,
ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29
appears inside two different URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, also known as web links or web addresses):
http://ark.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29
https://n2t.net/ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29
ARKs are especially good at being persistent identifiers (PIDs).
Why do we need persistent identifiers? Websites and databases change. As we redesign or migrate to new systems, the links to our resources break. Citations and links to your resources will produce the dreaded “404 Not Found” error. Irritating as that may be, it’s politically awkward when looking for publicly funded research, and it’s a cultural disaster for libraries, archives, museums, and other memory organizations.
Among the many links that can or once could lead you to things, a persistent identifier is a link that in principle keeps working far into the future. Services that provide discovery and interlinking (such as between research articles, authors, supporting data, and related research) prefer persistent identifiers because of that stability.
Persistent identifiers should keep working even as websites and databases change. Normally when resources move, everyone who ever recorded the old links would need to be told what the new links are, which is next to impossible. ARKs and the systems and tools that support them provide that persistence.
Resolvers
A resolver is a system that specializes in forwarding incoming identifiers (the ones originally advertised to users) to whichever websites are currently best able to deal with them. Overall, forwarding is called resolution; one step in a resolution process is called redirection.
For a resolver to work, its hostname (the n2t.net or ark.bnf.fr in the identifiers above) must be carefully chosen so it won’t ever need to be changed. Memory organizations, some of them centuries old, tend to have hostnames well-suited to be resolvers. Some well-known, younger resolvers are n2t.net (the ARK resolver), identifiers.org, doi.org, handle.net, and purl.org.
ARK structure
An ARK is represented by a sequence of characters that contains the label, “ark:”. When embedded in a URL, it is preceded by the protocol (https://) and name of a service that provides support for that ARK. That service name, or the “Name Mapping Authority” (NMA), is mutable and replaceable, as neither the web server itself nor the current web protocols are expected to last longer than the identified objects. The immutable, globally unique identifier follows the “ark:” label. This includes a “Name Assigning Authority Number” (NAAN) identifying the naming organization, followed by the name that it assigns to the object.
Here is a diagrammed example:
https://example.org/ark:/12345/x54xz321/s3/f8.05v.tiff
\_________________/ \__/ \___/ \______/\____/\_______/
| | | | | |
| ARK Label | | Sub-parts Variants
| | |
Name Mapping Authority (NMA) | Assigned Name
|
Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN)
A peek at ARK anatomy. You can spot an ARK by its internal label.
More details about ARK structure and syntax are available later in this guide.
How people are using ARKs
While many examples in this guide refer to resources in digital repositories, an ARK can be assigned to anything digital, physical, or abstract. That can include things that don’t yet exist but to which you need to refer 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 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.
Examples of things that have ARKs are listed below. Numbers are approximate, current as of September 2020, and self-reported by the identified ARK organizations.
- genealogical records (8 billion FamilySearch)
- publisher content (100 million Portico)
- scientific records (22 million INIST)
- scanned texts (20 million Internet Archive)
- bibliographic records (15 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 (5 million BnF Gallica)
- historical persons, families, and organizations (4 million SNACC)
- finding aids and special collections (4 million Merritt)
- resource maps (1.5 million RMap Hub)
- educational resources (1.1 million University of Utah)
- artistic and cultural artifacts (482,000 Louvre museum)
- vocabulary terms (9,000 Periodo, YAMZ)
- datasets, journals, archeological artifacts, living beings, and anything else you can think of!
Persistence means persistent management
By itself, assigning an ARK to a thing will not do anything to guarantee persistence. You’ll need to use the tools and services associated with ARKs to maintain a record of the ARKs you’ve assigned, the things they represent, and the current live URLs for those things. If the things or URLs change, you’ll need to update that information so that persistent URLs continue to work.
See 10 persistent myths about persistent identifiers.
All identifier systems are subject to the same weaknesses:
- They all fail to stop the major causes of broken links: loss of funding, natural disaster, social upheaval, war, deliberate removal, human error, and provider neglect.
- They all require you, the end provider, to update forwarding tables as URLs change.
- They all identify content that is subject to change or removal on future visits.
- They all have identifiers that break regularly and in large numbers – many thousands and more.
- They all rely on ordinary redirection built in to web servers since 1994 and provided for free by hundreds of URL shortening services.
Given how little the schemes do for you, when choosing one you’ll likely want to consider factors such as cost, risk, and openness.