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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.
Getting started
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First you need a NAAN (Name Assigning Authority Number), which is a number reserved exclusively for your organization. It must appear in every ARK your organization assigns, just after the "ark:/" label. The NAAN in all of these ARKs,
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is 12148, and it uniquely identifies the French National Library. Each NAAN is associated with the URL of a resolver for its ARKs, for example, to resolve 12148 ARKs, append them to https://gallica.bnf.fr/ as shown in above. The N2T.net resolver is unusual in that it routes any ARK to resolver registered under its NAAN.
There is no charge to obtain or use a NAAN, and you can request one by filling out an online form. Over 500 organizations have NAANs – libraries, archives, museums, university departments, government agencies, scholarly and educational publishers, etc. – all listed in the public NAAN registry.
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To anything digital, physical, abstract. That can include things that don't yet exist but that to which you need to reference refer from objects that you're in the process of creating or planning, such as a link from a draft article to a dataset under preparation, or a link from an archived digital letter to a planned finding aid.
One caution is that you should generally assign ARKs to things that you own, control, or manage. Assigning ARKs to things you don't control is discouraged because such identifiers tend to be fragile.
How do I start creating the character strings that become ARKs?
You are generally free to generate new create strings as you wish. It is common to leverage legacy identifiers by taking, ; for example, museum moth specimen number cd456_f987 and calling it could be advertised under ark:/12345/cd456_f987 (assuming 12345 is your NAAN). Some legacy identifiers may need to be altered in view of ARK character string restrictions, eg, be careful with hyphens.
If you are creating entirely new ARK identifier stringsARKs, it is important to consider whether to make them opaque, non-opaque, or a bit of both. Persistent identifier strings are often typically opaque, deliberately revealing little about what they're assigned to, because non-opaque identifiers do not age or travel well. Organization names are notoriously transient, which is why NAANs are opaque numbers. As titles and dates are corrected, word meanings evolve, and innocent old acronyms become offensive or infringing, strings meant to be persistent can become confusing or politically challenging. Opaque identifiers . Some organizations even avoid sequential assignment of opaque strings because users make mistaken policy inferences. While opaque strings avoid these problems, but on the other hand, can they can also be hard to administer. (hintHint: metadata really helps). to the rescue!)
| Example strings with a range of opacity | |||
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| non-opaque | Netscape Permanent Archive | Gay_Divorcee_1934_April_1 | Name-to-Thing Resolver |
| opaque-ish | x0001, x0002, ..., x9998 | GD/1934/04/01 | n2t.net |
| opaquer | 141e86dc-d396-4e59-bbc2-4c3bf5326152 | 19340401 | n2t |
| opaquest | 141e86dcd3964e59bbc24c3bf5326152 | h8k74926g | 12148 |
There are no rigid rules, only but there are tradeoffs regarding things like legacy compatibility, and ease of generation , legacy compatibility, transcribability (and transcription (eg, brevity, check digits), and brevity. Strings can be created (minted) with software counters, date/time, UUID, and UUID number generators, and as well as Noid (Nice Opaque Identifiers) minters.
How do I
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serve my ARKs?
First, decide what the experience of accessing one of your ARKs should be.
xxxx o resolve to? Examples: formatted file, surrogate for a physical thing, landing page with choices, etc.
Serving ARKs is Serving ARKs is like serving URLs. Normally incoming URL strings address (get mapped to) content that your web server returns. If your server is ARK-aware, incoming ARKs (expressed as URLs) must be mapped to the same content. A common approach is to map the ARK to the URL using a software table that you update whenever the URL changes. In this case your server is acting as a local resolver. That means that you will advertise your URL-based ARKs rooted at your own resolver's hostname. If If you don't want to implement this yourself, there are ARK software tools and services that can help.
Another approach is to run your web server without change, but instead of updating local tables, you would update ARK-to-URL mapping tables residing at a non-local resolver. Examples of this approach can be found among vendors and in any organization that uses an API/UI to update tables residing at the n2t.net resolver via updates tables via ezid.cdlib.org.
xxx
nstead of update ARK If you choose to run your own ARK infrastructure, you get complete autonomy at the expense of maintaining a server/resolver. On the one hand, you might run all custom infrastructure – including content management, web hosting, minting (generating unique identifier strings), and running your own server/resolver. That infrastructure could be very simple, such as server configured to map incoming ARK-based URLs to server file pathnames. When you request your NAAN you will be asked to supply the base URL of your local server or resolver.
At the other extreme, you might work with a vendor that supplies all the infrastructure so that, for example, you can focus on creating content. Hybrid solutions are also common, such as just taking your current web server arrangement and just adding an identifier management piece (eg, the API/UI provided by ezid.cdlib.org, which partners with n2t.net).
You will also want to think about whether to advertise (release, publish, disseminate) your ARKs based at your resolver or at n2t.net. You might choose the former for branding or the latter for stability. Resolving your ARKs through n2t.net is always possible, regardless of how you advertise them (this is a side-effect of obtaining a NAAN).
to anything digital, physical, abstract, etc. This often includes things that don't yet exist but that you need to reference from objects that you're in the process of creating or planning, such as a link from a draft article to a dataset under preparation, or a link from an archival object to a planned finding aid.
How do I start resolving my ARKs?
One caveat is that you should generally assign ARKs to things that you own, control, or manage. ARKs, or any identifiers, that you assign to things you don't control will tend to be fragile.
(which, due to a special relationship, updates resolver tables at n2t.net).
How do I advertise my ARKs?
An important decision is whether you will advertise (release, publish, disseminate) your URL-based ARKs under a local hostname or the N2T.net resolver. If local control or branding is important enough, you would advertise ARKs based at your local resolver. If you're concerned about the stability of your local hostname, you would advertise your ARKs based at n2t.net (see examples of both).
Resolving your ARKs through n2t.net is always possible for users, regardless of how you advertise them.
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Can I assign ARKs to things inside something that already has an ARK?
Yes, ARKs can be assigned at any level of granularity, such as to a manuscript, to chapters inside it, to chapter sections, subsections, etc. An ARK can also be assigned to a thing that encloses other things. In ARKs the character '/' is reserved to help the recipient understand about containment, for example, the first ARK below contains the second ARK:
ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v
ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29
That's the containment qualifier. There's only one other ARK qualifier, and it indicates variant forms of a thing by using the reserved character '.' in front of a suffix. For example, if these ARKs identify documents,
ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29.pdf
ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v/f29.html
because they differ only by the suffix .pdf or .html, it can be inferred that they identify two different forms of the same document.
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There are also some vendors, such as ezid.cdlib.org, and some more information on concepts and best practices.
What is
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N2T? xxx
NAAN stands for Name Assigning Authority Number, which is a unique 5-digit number that begins (after the "ark:" label) every ARK. The NAAN identifies the organization that assigned the ARK and ensures that two different organizations can never assign the same ARK. If your NAAN were 12345 and your resolver were my.example.org, your ARKs would all start with
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These are the major persistent identifier types (or schemes). They have all been around since 2001 and they have much in common, starting with structure.
https://n2t.net/ark:/99999/12345
https://doi.org/10.99999/12345
https://handle.net/10.99999/12345
https://purl.org/99999/12345
https://<various>/urn:99999:12345
ARKs, DOIs, and Handles are all found in places like the Data Citation Index ℠ and ORCID.org profiles. As seen in these examples, they all have three parts:
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