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- digital content, such as genealogical records (FamilySearch)
- publisher content (Portico)
- digitized manuscripts (Gallica)
- texts (Internet Archive)
- museum holdings (Smithsonian)
- vocabulary terms (yamz.net, perio.do)
- historical figures (snaccooperative.org)
- datasets, journals, living beings, and more.
Why would I use ARKs compared to, for example, DOIs?
- To keep costs down.
- To work with exactly the metadata I want.
- To be able to create identifiers without metadata.
- To create an identifier as soon as I create the first draft of my data.
- To keep that identifier private while the data evolves, and decide (maybe years) later, to publish or discard it.
- To keep retain that identifier upon publication, and to assign perhaps then assigning an additional identifier, such as a DOI.
- To integrate with the Data Citation Index ℠ and ORCID.org researcher profiles.
- To link identifiers to different kinds of nuanced persistence commitments.
- To use open infrastructure consistent with my organization's values.
- To create one identifier that enables millions (suffix passthrough).
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And they all have little effect on persistence.
Do you mean that ARK, DOI, Handle, PURL, and URN are all useless?
That's too strong a statement, however, it's good wise to keep these identifier schemes (types) in perspective.
- 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 burden require you, 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 all have identifiers for content that is subject to change on future visits.
- They all have identifiers that break regularly and in large numbers (many thousands and more).
- They all give access to almost any kind of thing, whether digital, physical, abstract, person, group, etc.
- A non-trivial fraction of each scheme's identifiers will fail permanently, requiring forwarding to "tombstone" pages.
- They all use ordinary redirection built in to web servers since 1994 and provided for free by hundreds of URL shortening services.
Given how little each type gives you, it is wise to they give you, when choosing a scheme you should consider factors such as cost, risk, and openness when choosing one.
How do ARKs differ from identifiers like DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs?
The short answer is that ARKs are the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers that you can register to use in about 24 48 hours. DOIs, Handles, and PURLs require resolution and other services to come from their respective centralized systems (silos).
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ARKs are very unusual in being decentralized. While one can get resolution services from a global ARK resolver called n2t.net, over 90% of the ARKs in the world do not use are published without reference to it.
More than 500 registered organizations across the world have created an estimated 3.2 billion ARKs, and, as with URLs, no one has ever paid to create them. Of course maintaining them isn't free; it's never free without cost to keep content access persistent in the long term, regardless of identifier type.
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