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ARK Alliance

Home of the Archival Resource Key (ARK)

Community update 2024-11-07: 1400 ARK organizations

Donut chart with a labeled segment for each named top-level domain. The four largest segments also show their percentages, and a bracket groups the thinnest slices as smaller TLDs.
ARK organizations by top-level domain (TLD). The four largest shares are .fr 25.2%, .com 12.8%, .org 12.1%, and .edu 9.2%. The remaining share, about 41%, is split among many smaller TLDs, each under 5%. In the chart’s order, the largest of these are .net, .ca, .nl, .ar, .ch, .be, .eu, .uk, .br, .gov, and .cu.
World Digital Preservation Day, 7th November 2024

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.