The ARK tutorial described below was first offered in 2023 and has been given at conferences such as Code4lib, IIIF, JCDL, iPRES, and Open Repositories. We will continue to adapt the content for other conferences, but a basic 30-minute ARK tutorial video recording is available.

Course description

Title: Getting started with ARK persistent identifiers

In this 3-hour workshop we will introduce you to ARKs (Archival Resource Keys), which can serve as persistent identifiers, or stable, trusted references for information objects (eg, web addresses that don’t return 404 Page Not Found errors). For more than two decades, 8.2 billion ARKs have been created by over 1400 organizations — libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, government agencies, and vendors. We will cover:

• Why ARKs – non-paywalled, decentralized, flexible
• Use cases – Smithsonian, French National Library, Internet Archive
• Metadata for early and ongoing object development
• How to get started – one form to fill out
• Minting and assigning ARK identifiers
• Resolvers, resolution, redirection
• Object types – digital, physical, conceptual
• Persistence considerations
• Available tools

Instructors

John Kunze is a pioneer in the theory and practice of digital libraries. With a background in computer science and mathematics, he wrote BSD Unix tools that come pre-installed with Mac and Linux systems. He created the ARK identifier scheme (arks.org), the N2T.net scheme-agnostic resolver, and contributed heavily to the first standards for URLs (RFC1736, RFC1625, RFC2056), library search and retrieval (Z39.50), archival transfer (BagIt – RFC8493), web archiving (WARC), and metadata (RFC2413, RFC2731, ANSI/NISO Z39.85).

Donny Winston has a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His doctoral area of specialization was nanofabrication, with both experimental and computational work. Donny has worked in a research capacity at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY; at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD; at Carl Zeiss R&D in Peabody, MA; at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA; and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, CA. He is the owner and principal of Polyneme LLC; a cofounder of the FAIR Points event series; and host of the Machine-Centric Science podcast.