...
gets you to a dissertation, and adding a '?' on the end of the ARK gets should get you to its description:
https://n2t.net/ark:/67531/metadc107835/?
...
The average lifetime of a URL has been was once said to be 44 days. At the end of its life, a URL link breaks, which means meaning it gives you the dreaded "404 Not Found" error. Irritating as that is – and most of us have we've all seen it – it's a disaster for libraries, archives, museums, and other memory organizations.
A persistent identifier (sometimes abbreviated PID) is an identifier a link that in principle keeps working far into the future, even as things move between websites. Normally when things move, everyone who ever recorded the old links would need to be told that there are what the new links are, which is next to impossible. That's where identifier resolvers come in.
...
A resolver is a website that is especially good at specializes in forwarding incoming identifiers (the ones originally advertised to users) to other whichever websites that are currently best able to deal with them. TechnicallyOverall, forwarding is called resolution, one piece of which is ; one step in a resolution process is called redirection.
To make it For a resolver to work, the its hostname of the resolver must be carefully chosen so that it never has won't ever need to be changed. Memory organizations, some of them centuries old, tend to have website hostnames that are well-suited to be resolvers. Some well-known, younger resolvers are n2t.net, identifiers.org, doi.org, handle.net, and purl.org.
...
That's not to say that making your identifiers ARKs persistent is free of the usual cost-free. Keeping any identifiers persistent burdens every provider with the costs of content management, hosting, monitoring, and forwarding. You can do those things yourself or via with help from a vendor, but with ARKs do not lock you you are not charged separately for your identifiers and you are not locked in to a special-purpose resolution silo that also locks out other identifiers.
...
Yes, but first let's dispense with what ARKs, DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs have in common. As seen in these examples, they have similar structure:
https://n2t.net/ark:/99999/12345
https://doi.org/10.99999/12345
https://handle.net/10.99999/12345
https://purl.org/12345
https://???/urn:99999:12345
They all start with the protocol (https://) plus a hostname, followed by the Name Assigning Authority (99999, 10.99999, or purl.org), which is the organization that created a particular identifier. Finally there's the name, or local identifier, that it assigned (12345). Some other More things these identifier types have in common:
- They all fail to stop the major causes of broken links: loss of funding, natural disaster, war, deliberate removal, human error, and provider neglect.
- They all require burden the end provider with the responsibility to update forwarding tables as URLs change.
- They all give access to any kind of thing, whether digital, physical, abstract, person, group, etc.
- They all identify content that is subject to change on future visits.
- They all break regularly and in large numbers (thousands and more).
- They all use very simple redirection built in to every web server since 1995 and done provided for free by hundreds of URL shortening services.
- They all (as a result) leave you wondering if you need them at all, and if so, at what cost.
So how do these identifiers differ? Here's a short list.
- When (not if, since because all things pass) the https:// protocol and the hostname cease to exist, only ARKs and URNs will still indicate the kind type of identifier that remains.
- For DOIs, Handles, and PURLs, you are required to use their respective resolvers. ARKs and URNs, permit you to use your own resolver.
- To create DOIs and Handles, you are required to pay a membership fee and, for DOIs, per-DOI charges. There are no fees for ARKs, PURLs, and URNs.
- Although you can use your own or a vendor resolver for your ARKs and URNs, all ARKs can be resolved via n2t.net, making it the closest thing to a "global ARK resolver".
- For URNs there is no single global resolver. In order to register to create URNs, you must apply for a URN namespace.
...