ARK Alliance

Wrapping up 2025 with 1720 ARK organizations

2025-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

2025 has been a great year for the ARK Alliance. The 1720+ ARK organizations include 12 national libraries, 215 universities, 254 archives, 144 museums, 124 journals, and 59 scientific centers.

2025 has been a great year for the ARK Alliance (ARKA). With 247 new organizations registered so far, the total number of ARK organizations stands at 1720. That includes:

12 national libraries,
215 universities,
254 archives,
144 museums,
124 journals, and
59 scientific centers.

Some highlights for 2025:

Implementors are welcome to add the ARK logo to their sites and collections, linking back to arks.org. The logo, with transparent (cut out) background, is available to be copied (e.g., right-click and “Save image as”) in PNG or SVG format:

ARK tutorials have been given at conferences including IIIF, Europeana Pro, DCMI, iPRES, SWIB, and Fedora Virtual Showcase, with two new videos added to the ARKA youtube channel and a French-language tutorial presented in Dakar (slides).
In July a new NAAN request form was deployed that helps us build a richer picture of ARK usage, along with a new streamlined backend request processing workflow.
In October the classic-to-modern ARK document conversion was completed and inflection support for metadata (e.g., “?info” suffix) was added to the refreshed global ARK resolver based at N2T.net.
In November we hosted a lively open community call with lots of new faces (48 attendees) and short talks from the ARK Alliance, California Digital Library, FamilySearch, and the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) (slides). This will be part of an ongoing series of community calls.
Since our last community update, three new volunteers were approved for ARKA working groups: Josefrank Pernalete, Editorial Mar Caribe; Cécile Queffélec, BnF (National Library of France); and Gabriel Silveira Marques, Brazilian Institute of Information in Science.

As a reminder we are always open to new working group members for Outreach (presentations, document translation, etc.), NAAN curation (request processing), and Technical (software, specifications, support). If you wish to volunteer, please express your interest by filling out this form.

Thank you for supporting ARKA and best wishes for 2026!

Invest in Open Infrastructure supports LA Referencia and the dARK initiative

2025-12-11T00:00:00-08:00

LA Referencia and the dARK (Decentralized ARK) initiative will receive up to US$1.5M in funding as one of the inaugural winners of the IOI Network Adoption Fund.

[This post is based on the recent IOI announcement.]

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) announced in November 2025 that LA Referencia is one of the inaugural winners of the IOI Network Adoption Fund. It will receive up to US$1.5M in funding to advance adoption of open infrastructure and strengthen regional research ecosystems. IOI will also provide ongoing implementation support for governance, community engagement, financial and business models, ensuring the resilience and long-term impact.

LA Referencia, which is the Latin America + Spain Open Science Network, operates a regional aggregation and discovery platform that currently connects 10 countries, collecting and preserving research information from national repositories in each member country. Key elements of the proposed project include:

Expand services to include 10 additional Latin American countries, fostering new member countries and strengthening a more inclusive and equitable regional network.
Implement a decentralized persistent identifier system (dARK) – currently working at IBICT (Brazil) with ARK identifiers and green blockchain technology – to ensure that research outputs and metadata remain permanently accessible and verifiable, even in the event of local system failures.
Upgrade to an LLM-powered multilingual semantic search system capable of discovering research across languages and connecting scholarly work beyond linguistic barriers, combined with advanced metadata enrichment to enable new metrics and more transparent and diverse approaches to regional research assessment.
Create a regional Dataverse repository for orphan datasets and expand training and translation programs to help institutions use Dataverse effectively.

ARK documentation changing to show modern ARKs (ark:) by default instead of classic ARKs (ark:/)

2025-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

In late 2025 the ARK Alliance (arks.org) will convert its existing documentation and modify its communication practices to align with the modern form of ARKs, the most visible difference being removal of the slash (‘/’) at the end of “ark:/”. Two ARKs that differ only in form are equivalent in perpetuity.

Over the month of September 2025 the ARK Alliance (ARKA) will convert its existing documentation and modify its communication practices to align with the modern form of ARKs used in the ARK technical specification since 2019. The most visible difference, described in a 2022 blog post, is the removal of the slash ('/') at the end of "ark:/".

Every modern form ARK is, in perpetuity, considered equivalent to the same ARK in classic form. Thus these two ARKs always refer to the same thing:

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:67531/metadc28359     # modern form
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28359    # classic form

There’s nothing for ordinary ARK users to do. Since 2019, ARK implementers have been encouraged to accept both forms, and those that do so already will be completely unaffected by the upcoming documentation change. Those that do not yet accept both forms run a small risk, increasing over time, that some of their ARKs will appear to be broken.

The problem is that over time, ARKs published (issued) in classic form will get harvested by well-meaning aggregators and converted (normalized) into modern form for display to users. ARKs issued in modern form can also get converted into classic form. The general risk is that any published ARK is out in the wild where it may get converted to either form and will then appear to break (e.g., a 404 Not Found error) if the local resolver only accepts the form in which the ARK was issued. Even if the original ARK still works, the user experiencing an error due to a difference in form will tend to blame the local resolver or original ARK issuer.

What implementers can do to minimize risk

ARK implementers are always free, in perpetuity, to store and manage ARKs in any way they wish, and the easiest way to accept ARKs in another form is to convert them on the way into the local resolver (server).

There is no single recipe, but for some common resolver implementations, a one-line change might be enough to make a server support both forms. In a technical glimpse of a simplified, hypothetical Apache server example, adding the question mark to this configuration line turns a server of classic ARKs into a server that accepts both forms:

RewriteRule   ark:/?12345/(.*)   "/collection/$1"
#                  ^ this '?' accepts both ark:/ and ark:

On a technical level, tools that support classic ARKs should be changed as follows in order to support modern ARKs:

accept the streamlined label “ark:” in addition to “ark:/”,
remove the classic ARK 128 character length restriction,
support a minimum of 255 characters for the Base Name and Qualifier,
allow the ‘~’ character but disallow the ‘#’ character,
add the “?info” inflection to request descriptive and permanence metadata,
remove the classic ARK requirement that NAANs be 5-digit numbers,
support a minimum of 16 characters for the NAAN, and
allow the possibility of future NAANs to be strings of 1 or more betanumeric characters (digits and consonants minus the letter ‘l’); in the near future, however, new NAANs will continue to be 5-digit numbers.

Please see the ARK technical specification for all details concerning modern ARKs.

Conclusion

In summary, to avoid the small risk of published ARKs appearing to break when they come back in a different form, local resolver implementations that don’t already do so should start accepting incoming ARKs in both modern and classic forms.

There is no special urgency to accept both forms, but the risks will increase as modern ARKs become more prevalent over time. If you have questions or concerns about this documentation change, please consider using the public email forums:

arks-forum@googlegroups.com (English)
arks-forum-fr@framalistes.org (French)
arks-forum-ib@googlegroups.com (Spanish and Portuguese)

Access to open data at the National Library of France using ARK variants

2025-07-23T00:00:00-07:00

An early adopter of ARKs, the BnF has developed practices for displaying persistent linked open data (LOD) using ARK suffixes for object variants.

This post introduces data.bnf.fr (dataBnF), the data gateway service of the French National Library, or Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The main purpose of dataBnF is to promote BnF data discoverability and re-use both within and beyond its catalogs. This article dives into some details of how a national library uses ARK (Archival Resource Key) identifiers to support the Semantic Web’s vision of a “Web of Data”, which is built on Linked Open Data (LOD) for sharing structured (hierarchical), machine-readable information on the web.

In 2024, the dataBnF website underwent a major usability and graphic redesign to make the interface more readable and to offer more intuitive, operational features for discovering BnF collections. This project was an opportunity to reexamine how ARK identifiers were implemented and presented on the website, and to leverage ARK variant form qualifiers in order to return metadata and inter-resource relationships needed by the Semantic Web.

Where we started

One challenge was to take data offered by the BnF in traditional catalogue-entity formats such as INTERMARC (BnF’s version of the MARC format) and XML-EAD, and to make it available in modern formats such as RDF and JSON. These modern formats express a hierarchical entity as a flattened byte stream (serialization) for easy transmission over networks and later reconstruction (deserialization) on the receiving end. The main objectives of dataBnF were as follows.

Aggregate BnF data produced in a variety of formats.
Expose them as Linked Open Data ready for Semantic Web applications such as OWL ontologies, SPARQL queries, knowledge graphs, AI-powered tools.
Experiment with and create new services, including data visualizations.

A goal of dataBnF was to facilitate access to BnF resources in their original environment: authority and bibliographic records from the general catalogue, records from the BnF Archives and Manuscripts catalogue, educational resources from the Les Essentiels portal, digitized documents from Gallica, etc.

All of these resources are identified by ARKs whose “shoulder” (a kind of internal prefix) varies depending on the source application. A BnF ARK shoulder is a 2- or 3-letter code following the ark:/12148/ that begins each BnF ARK. A resource from the general catalogue is prefixed by the two characters “cb” (ark:/12148/cb13913991p). If the resource is imported from EAD, it is prefixed by “cc” (ark:/12148/cc56356g). Gallica resources are prefixed by “btv” or “bpt” (for example, ark:/12148/bpt6k1911706t and ark:/12148/btv1b108674013).

While many Semantic Web links (URLs, or https:// URIs) out in the wild are not meant to be “actionable” (they always return a 404 Page Not Found error), in stricter alignment with Linked Open Data principles, dataBnF ARKs are actionable. As such, all dataBnF ARKs are Semantic Web links that are meant to persist and to resolve.

When we began the dataBnF project, these ARKs were often overlooked by users. They appeared at the bottom of the page, while the impersistent page URLs that appeared up top in the browser’s location bar tended to get used for citation. This is a common problem for all persistent identifier (PID) types. Our solution was to make sure that the ARK appears in the location bar. which encourages the use of ARKs in citations and in search engine indexes (SEO).

We also wanted to simplify and rationalize the sometimes confusing mix of ways to access different representations of a resource, such as the HTML page or RDF/XML representation (the set of semantic triples whose subject or object is the URL). When we started out,

adding an .rdf suffix to the ARK URL led to the RDF/XML representation,
adding an .rdf suffix to the impersistent page URL did the same thing, and
using HTTP content negotiation via a software client was a third way.

Where we got to

To simplify the user experience and our own maintenance, we added download buttons to help users explicitly request a representation. We also took advantage of the ARK variant qualifier mechanism to support the same thing for software (and human) clients. Since the website redesign, access to different representations of the resource is provided using the following qualifiers (suffixes):

.rdf or .rdfxml for RDF/XML
.rdfnt for N-triples
.rdfn3 for Notation3
.rdfjsonld for JSON-LD
.json for JSON
.pdf for PDF

For example, here’s some of the metadata downloaded in RDF/XML upon accessing https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z.rdfxml.

<rdf:Description rdf:about="https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb414064167#Expression">
  <bnfroles:r70 rdf:resource="https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z#about"/>
  <marcrel:aut rdf:resource="https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z#about"/>
  <dcterms:contributor rdf:resource="https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z#about"/>
</rdf:Description>
  <rdf:Description rdf:about="https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z">
  <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#Concept"/>
  <bnf-onto:FRBNF rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer">12515307</bnf-onto:FRBNF>
  <skos:editorialNote xml:lang="fr">Le journal de Frida Kahlo / introd. de Carlos Fuentes ; av.-propos de Sarah M. Lowe ; [trad. de l'espagnol par Rauda Jamis, et de l'anglais par Martine Laroche et Olivier Meyer], 1995. - . - Frida Kahlo, Leo Matiz, 2003. - . -</skos:editorialNote>
  <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="fr">Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)</skos:prefLabel>
  <skos:altLabel xml:lang="fr">Frida Kahlo de Rivera (1907-1954)</skos:altLabel>
  <isni:identifierValid>0000000121477893</isni:identifierValid>
  <bnf-onto:isniAttributionDate rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date">2013-10-24</bnf-onto:isniAttributionDate>
  <bnf-onto:isniAttributionAgency>VIAF</bnf-onto:isniAttributionAgency>
  <skos:note xml:lang="fr">Peintre. - Épouse du peintre : Diego Rivera (1886-1957)</skos:note>
  <dcterms:created>1996-06-04</dcterms:created>
  <dcterms:modified>2013-10-24</dcterms:modified>
  <foaf:focus rdf:resource="https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z#about"/>
  <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo"/>
  <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z"/>
  <rdau:P61160 rdf:resource="http://www.rdaregistry.info/termList/statIdentification/1001"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="http://fr.dbpedia.org/resource/Frida_Kahlo"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="http://isni.org/isni/0000000121477893"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="https://musicbrainz.org/artist/15bd9f83-0073-432c-b1a4-0c3a6fa1e3b9"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/110981647/"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="http://wikidata.org/entity/Q5588"/>
  <skos:exactMatch rdf:resource="http://www.idref.fr/027696707"/>
  <skos:closeMatch rdf:resource="http://datos.bne.es/resource/XX1119271"/>
  <skos:closeMatch rdf:resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/11855932X"/>
  <skos:closeMatch rdf:resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/n82031966"/>
</rdf:Description>

The “default” variant (no suffix) for https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12515307z returns simple metadata displayed in HTML, as shown below. All the download and export choices (PDF, JSON, XML, NT, N3, and JSON-LD) can be selected from the buttons and drop-down menus circled in red in the upper right-hand corner.

We invite you to visit dataBnF to see how the National Library of France provides simple access to all resource representations and makes the ARK identifier constantly visible to users.

Arklet-frick: bringing ARKs from need to implementation at the Frick Collection

2024-11-10T00:00:00-08:00

Arklet-frick is a tool created by the Frick collection for minting and resolving ARKs.

Exterior of the Frick Collection building in New York City (photo by Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0)

In 2021, the Frick Collection announced that it would start assigning ARK identifiers to assets in its digital collections and library catalog. The decision came after a migration to a new ILS (integrated library system) and the obsolescence of the old system’s identifiers and permalinks. The breakdown in both public links and systems interoperability spurred the Frick Collection to explore assigning persistent identifiers and ultimately to select ARKs.

From May to September 2023, the Frick Collection worked with a developer, Emery Infrastructure, to implement software that could mint, manage, and resolve ARKs. The software expanded on arklet, an ARK minting and resolving tool designed and maintained by the Internet Archive. The modified tool, arklet-frick, makes several improvements and changes to arklet.

In addition to supporting URL resolution, arklet-frick supports six Dublin Core metadata fields: title, identifier, source, relation, type, and format. Additional features supported include suffix passthrough, content negotiation for metadata delivery, and a command line interface. Future improvements will include support for subparts and commitment statements.

To create ARKs with arklet-frick, which uses a technical base of Python and Django, an organization must first request a NAAN (name assigning authority number) and enter it into the Django administration interface in order to generate an API key. This interface is also where administrators can create and manage shoulders, which subdivide a NAAN‚Äôs namespace. Shoulders are one of the most powerful and flexible features of the ARK specification because they allow ARKs to support a variety of content and usage standards. The Frick uses separate shoulders for the DAMS and the library catalog, which helps keep ARKs organized and easy to understand.

With a NAAN, shoulder, and API key in hand, users of arklet-frick can immediately start using the command line interface to experiment with ARKs. The application supports three key activities: minting, updating, and resolving. When minting ARKs, users can supply metadata for both the URL and Dublin Core fields. Resolving ARKs generically redirects users to the value stored in the URL field, but users can also append a “?info” or “?json” extension to see metadata directly. The Frick uses DigitalOcean as a provider for its production deployment of arklet-frick.

The Frick ran its testing phase for arklet-frick from September 2023 and to the end of the year. During this time, the Frick integrated the Django application into its existing systems, assigned user roles, created shoulders, and generated API keys for testing and production use cases. For each shoulder the Frick created, we created a set of rules governing the use case for the shoulder and the standards for the Dublin Core metadata fields.

The open source code for arklet-frick is available on Github, where we welcome feedback. In a separate blog post we will present how the Frick has been using ARKs since launching its API.

Community update 2024-11-07: 1400 ARK organizations

2024-11-06T00:00:00-08:00

The ARK Alliance surpasses 1400 ARK organizations and reveals a promising new ARK minting and resolving tool.

Percent of ARK organizations per top-level domain. #WDPD2024

Today being World Digital Preservation Day, we are delighted to announce that the number of ARK organizations has surpassed 1400. That number includes

10 national libraries
185 universities
209 archives
104 museums
101 journals

In the past year we have been busy converting both the ARK Alliance website (originally under WordPress) and working group wiki (originally under Confluence) to GitHub-based hosting. Meanwhile,

224 new ARK organizations were registered,
8 ARK tutorials of varying length were given at conferences such as Open Repositories, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Latindex, Linked Open Data, and the Western Association of Map Libraries,
a 30-minute ARK tutorial video was made available, and
a new Spanish and Portuguese discussion forum was created.

We are also excited to share a promising new open source software package for organizations implementing ARKs. Starting with the Internet Archive’s arklet implementation, developers at The Frick Collection have created the arklet-Frick tool. It adds improved security and bugfixes, as well as bulk operations, suffix passthrough, shoulder rules, extensive metadata, endpoints for ?info and ?json, and more. See the about pages for more information on these concepts.

As always we welcome volunteers for our working groups: Outreach, Technical, and NAAN Curation. If you wish to volunteer, please express your interest by filling out this form.

ARK Community Highlight: West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN)

2024-11-04T00:00:00-08:00

The WACREN network describes their use of ARKs and their new ARKs Management Dashboard.

The West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) is committed to advancing research and education through robust network infrastructure and innovative technological solutions across the region. The University of Ghana Legon and its Balme Library (above), is participating in WACREN along with members from 20 countries. As the association of NRENs in the region, our organisation plays a pivotal role in fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing among academic and research institutions, thus contributing to the socio-economic development of West and Central Africa.

While we are relatively new to utilising ARKs, we have swiftly integrated them into our operations. Specifically, we have developed a software platform dedicated to minting and resolving ARKs, harnessing their unique capabilities to enhance our services and support our organisational goals. The platform is built on arklet-frick, created by developers at The Frick Collection, which itself was originally based on code from the Internet Archive. The open source code for our platform will be made available.

We are pleased to announce the development of our new ARKs Management Dashboard, designed to streamline the management of minted arks with ease and accessibility in mind. Whether you’re new to ARKs or a seasoned user, our user-friendly dashboard empowers you to efficiently manage and track resources assigned to your ARKs without requiring any technical expertise. Providing a centralised space for storing and managing minted ARKs, you can easily view and organise them to ensure efficient resource allocation and utilisation.

In addition to the dashboard’s intuitive functionality, we offer an API that seamlessly integrates with other applications. This API enables developers and users to extend the capabilities of our dashboard, integrate it with existing systems, and automate processes, enhancing workflow efficiency and flexibility.

Our decision to implement ARKs stems from the PIDs roadmap developed under our LIBSENSE initiative. After carefully evaluating various Persistent Identifier (PID) options, we determined that ARKs best suit our needs due to their flexibility, interoperability, and robust resolution mechanisms. These attributes align seamlessly with our organizational requirements, making ARKs the preferred choice.

The adoption of ARKs has significantly transformed the way we work. By incorporating ARKs into our platform, we have streamlined our processes and improved the management and accessibility of digital resources. This has increased efficiency, reduced redundancy, and enhanced discoverability, ultimately empowering our users and facilitating collaboration within the research and education community.

The benefits of utilising ARKs are manifold. They provide a reliable means of persistently identifying digital resources, ensuring long-term accessibility and citation. Additionally, ARKs facilitate interoperability between different systems and platforms, enabling seamless integration and data exchange. Moreover, the robust resolution services associated with ARKs enhance the user experience by delivering accurate and reliable access to resources, thus fostering trust and confidence in our services.

Although we have yet to fully pilot the usage of ARKs with our platform, initial feedback has been positive. Stakeholders have expressed enthusiasm for ARK implementation and anticipate its potential benefits for our organization and the broader research and education community across West and Central Africa. We have integrated ARKs into BAOBAB, our shared repository platform, and will begin pilots with member NRENs in Nigeria, Ghana, and Burkina Faso in the new year.

Wrapping up 2023 with 1200 ARK organizations

2023-12-18T16:00:00-08:00

In 2023, the ARK Alliance achieved significant milestones, surpassing 1200 registered ARK organizations.

2023 was another big year for the ARK Alliance (ARKA). Some highlights:

registered 167 ARK organizations (most recent listed at the end)
developed the first ever ARK tutorial, delivered at 16 conferences in versions ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours; example videos: 60 minutes, 18 minutes
engaged the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) and LA Referencia (a Latin American network of open science repositories), which are contributing 3 people to ARKA working groups
welcomed a total of 9 new working group members to the ARK Alliance
- Donny Winston, John Jung, Chloé Pochon, Omo Oaiya, Lesley Frew, Lautaro Matas, Sefakor Ankora, Jack O’Malley, and Sergio Santamarina
published the ARK Community Code of Conduct
worked with the Dutch PID Guide (PIDwijzer) to integrate ARKs
made ARK Alliance stickers available to order online here

The past six months have seen the usual accelerating growth in the ARK community, including registration of 93 new ARK organizations. As always we welcome new volunteers for our working groups, especially those interested in raising ARK awareness and curating requests for new ARK organizations. Please let us know via email to info@arks.org.

With a total of over 1200, we close with a list of the 93 ARK organizations registered since 2023-06-11:

Archives municipales de Noisiel
Musée de la préfecture de Police
Núcleo de Historia Social Popular
Efficience Digitale
Varga Webkiadó
Stichting Het Behouden Blik
Museum Wierdenland
Museum Klooster Ter Apel
Egyháztörténeti Szemle
Sárospataki Füzetek
West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN)
Museum du Havre
AIPMEL
Pakistan Journal of Linguistics
Archives municipales de Thionville
Libro Cazadores de Microbios en Venezuela
NFDI4Culture
Journal of Intelligent Systems and Computing
Archives Municipales de Rémire-Montjoly
Revista Científica ConCiencia Jurídica
Revista Cubana de Tecnología de la Salud
NOBLE Institute for New Generation
Royal Institute for Research and Educational Development
Gaceta Médica Estudiantil
Proyecto Albalat - Projet Albalat
Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica
Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis
Shared NAAN for Inline Concepts
Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Köln
KLEKSI
European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
Rijksmuseum Boerhaave
Eko-Konnect Research and Education Initiative
The Claremont Colleges Library
Chaumet International SA
University of British Columbia ArtsISIT
Service des archives, Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne
Association Mélanges Caraïbes
Archives municipales de Rezé
Journal of Phytopathology and Disease Management
Área de Lingüística y Antropología (IMHICIHU-CONICET)
Arizona State Archives
Bursa Uludag University
Bronzeville Historical Society
Revista Politikón
Comité Interministeriel d’Aménagement du Territoire
University of Hawaii Climate Research Collaborative
Red de Información de Inteligencia Competitiva en los Deportes de Combate
Disc4All International Training Network
Ciencia Interior - Revista de Ciencias Básicas y Aplicadas
Musée national Picasso - Paris
Actoon
Musée Roybet-Fould
University of Innsbruck
Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires
Bulgarian Society of Neurology
Arca
Musée Saint-Vic
Universitas Utpadaka Swastika
Commune du Chesnay-Rocquencourt
Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland
Biblioteca Central de la Universidad de La Habana
NOLEJ
University of York Library Archives and Learning Services
Louis Andriessen Stichting
Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire Homme-Société
JCK museum
Archives Municipales de Roncq
Archives municipales de Pantin
Archives départementales de l’Isère
Het Scheepvaartmuseum
Repositorio Digital Institucional de la Universidad de Buenos Aires
Ελληνικό Μουσείο Πληροφορικής (Hellenic IT Museum)
Moebius Software
Archives du Palais princier de Monaco
Good Clinical Practice Alliance - Europe
meemoo (Flemish Institute for Archives)
Fondo Editorial CEIPA, Revista Perspectiva Empresarial
Universidad de Colima
Avignon Bibliothèques
Académie des sciences
RELEASE EDITORIAL LTDA
Colonial Collections Consortium
TP d’AVENIR
Association ARHIAs
Bibliothèques municipales de la ville de Genève
KastelenInNederland.nl
R74n
Burgerbibliothek Bern
Revista Cubana de Geografia
Macalester Street Journal
Agir pour l’École
Teylers Museum

Community update 2023-06-13: stickers, tutorials, code of conduct

2023-06-13T19:30:11-07:00

ARK Alliance’s thriving community adds 74 new organizations, launches vinyl stickers and tutorials, and introduces a Code of Conduct.

The past six months have seen strong growth in the ARK community, including registration of 74 new ARK organizations. As always we welcome new volunteers for our working groups, especially those interested in raising ARK awareness and curating requests for new ARK organizations. Please let us know via email to info@arks.org.

We now have stunning new vinyl ARK Alliance stickers! They are in a standard hexagonal format suitable for tiling your laptop, phone, refrigerator, etc. Currently they can only be ordered online here via Stickermule.

We are also happy to announce that a 3-hour ARK tutorial has been given this year at the annual Code4lib and IIIF conferences (slides here). There are four more tutorials coming up:

90 mins at DWeb Camp around June 20
180 mins at Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (ACM/IEEE JCDL) June 26
60 mins at Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) July 20
90 mins at International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) around Sept 20

Finally we would like to announce availability of the ARK Community Code of Conduct. This document represents consensus across the ARK Alliance Advisory Group and the NAAN Registry, Outreach, and Technical Working Groups. Working documents for these groups are linked from the sidebar on the ARKA wiki.

With a total of over 1100, here are the 74 newest ARK organizations registered between 2022-12-14 and 2023-06-11:

Cambridge University Library
Indiana University Library Technologies
National Library of Israel
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
Leipzig University Library
University of Edinburgh
Lexidoo
Academia Itapecuruense de Ciências, Letras e Artes
reDesign journal
REDict
Project Tirtha
Justo de la Cueva dokumentu eta artxibo gunea
BiUSI – Biblioteche dell’Università della Svizzera italiana
DELTA EXPERT
Cartodebat
FernUni Schweiz, UniDistance Suisse
University of Geneva
KSEC
AGENCE CINEMA EDUCATION
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Help us to make cultural heritage data more persistent

2023-05-31T07:01:15-07:00

Europeana Foundation seeks input through a survey to enhance persistent identifier practices in cultural heritage, ensuring data accessibility and interoperability in a common European data space.

[This guest post from colleagues at Europeana originally appeared here.]

Persistent identifiers are key to making cultural heritage data interoperable and encouraging reuse amongst audiences. Discover how the common European data space for cultural heritage consortium is working to support the sector to use these and take our survey to share your thoughts!

Building a common European data space for cultural heritage where data can be easily shared for reuse requires organisations that create data infrastructures to rely, as much as possible, on unique and persistent identifiers.

As the steward of the data space, Europeana Foundation, together with the 18 consortium members, is investing resources in reviewing the adoption and implementation of persistent identifiers in the cultural heritage sector. Read on to discover what persistent identifiers are, how we are doing this, and how you can get involved.

What is a persistent identifier?

A Persistent Identifier (PID) is a globally unique and long-lasting reference to potentially any sort of digital or non-digital entity, providing the information required to reliably identify, verify, locate and access it. They ensure that the digital entity is ‘set in stone’ and can always be findable through that identifier.

Examples of PIDs are Archival Resource Key (ARK), Digital Object Identifier (DOI), National Bibliography Numbers (NBN), Persistent Identifiers for eResearch (ePIC), among others.

To see how they work in practice, take, for example, the Mona Lisa (La Joconde). The painting is identified by an ARK persistent identifier, ‘ark:/53355/cl010066723’. If this persistent identifier is entered into relevant software (in this case, it can be resolved via the N2T global resolver to ‘https://n2t.net/ark:/53355/cl010066723)’ it then presents the webpage from the Louvre where the digitised object is presented alongside its digital representations. La Joconde will always be identifiable and findable on the web through this identifier.

Why are persistent identifiers important for the data space for cultural heritage?

Persistent identification sits at the foundation of the FAIR principles which stand for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The adoption of persistent identifiers by cultural heritage institutions with digital collections shows commitment towards interoperability and data access that in turn builds trust in the institution and the data it creates. Adoption of persistent identifiers will also support the dissemination and reuse of cultural heritage objects, helping to make them more accessible to audiences across the data space.

Not assigning persistent identifiers to digitised cultural heritage objects can also have a negative impact. The most common manifestation of the absence of a persistent identifier strategy are broken links which, besides affecting all forms of (re)use, also negatively impact the traffic towards the institution’s website and its SEO ranking amongst search engines.

Your input is key

We want to establish a consolidated and more robust persistent identification framework for the data space, and to do that, we need to understand your practices and activities towards the creation and management of persistent identifiers. Easier access to cultural heritage data, interoperability within and beyond the data space, discovery and reuse of cultural heritage data depend on it!

If you work in the technical or operational teams of a cultural heritage institution, and know how your institution manages identifiers for digitised objects, or if you are running an aggregation service, we invite you to take approximately 15 minutes to answer our survey. Please also share it with other colleagues that are most involved in this work.

The deadline for survey responses is 30 June 2023. Thank you in advance for your participation!

TAKE THE SURVEY