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What are ARKs?
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ARKs (Archival Resource Keys) are high-functioning identifiers that lead you to things and to descriptions of those things. For example, this ARK,
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The average lifetime of a URL has been said to be 44 days. At the end of its life, a URL link breaks, which means it gives you the dreaded "404 Not Found" error. As irritating as it is – and most of us have seen it happen – it's a disaster for libraries, archives, museums, and other memory organizations. A persistent identifier (sometimes abbreviated to PID) is an identifier that in principle will continue to work far into the future, even as things move between websites. Normally when things move, we're burdened with broken links and having to learn to use their new URLs (links), and that's where identifier resolvers come in.
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What's a resolver?
A resolver is a website that is especially good at forwarding an incoming identifier (the one originally advertised to users) to whatever website is currently best suited to deal with it. To make it work, the hostname of the resolver itself is carefully chosen so that it never has to be changed. Memory organizations, some of them centuries old, tend to have website hostnames that are especially stable as resolvers. Other well-known resolvers include n2t.net, identifiers.org, doi.org, handle.net, and purl.org.
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