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To anything digital, physical, abstract. That can include things that don't yet exist but to which you need to 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.
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You are generally free to create strings as you wish. It is common to leverage legacy identifiers; for example, museum moth specimen number cd456_f987 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 ARKs, it is important to consider whether to make them opaque, non-opaque, or a bit of both. Persistent identifier strings are 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. Some organizations even avoid sequential assignment of opaque strings because users make mistaken policy inferences. While opaque strings avoid these problems, they can also be hard to administer. (Hint: metadata to the rescue!)
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There are no rigid rules, but there are tradeoffs regarding things like compatibility with legacy identifiers, and ease of generation and transcription (eg, brevity, check digits). New strings can be created (minted) with date/time, UUID, and number generators, as well as Noid (Nice Opaque Identifiers) minters.
How do I serve my ARKs?
First, decide what the user experience of accessing your ARKs will be, for example, a spreadsheet file, a PDF, an image, a landing page filled with formatted metadata and a range of choices, etc. Whichever you choose, plan for your server to be able to respond with metadata if your ARK should arrive with a '?' inflection after it.
Otherwise, 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. 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 can be found among vendors and in any organization that updates tables via ezid.cdlib.org (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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N2T.net is , among other things, the closest thing to an ARK resstands a global ARK resolver that also happens to know where to redirect over 600 other types of identifier – ARK, DOI, PMID, Taxon, PDB, ISSN, etc.
N2T, which stands for Name-to-Thing, is a generic service for mapping names to things. It has two main operational modes. First, it stores individual metadata records for over 20 million things, including their ARK or DOI identifiers and redirection (target) URLs. For any identifier with a stored target, N2T can perform
Can I make changes to a NAAN? xxx
. ItYou may request a NAAN by filling out an an online form. The NAAN you obtain will be listed alongside all other NAANs in the public NAAN registry, which you are free to browse through. Use that same form to update your registry entry, for example, if you make a change to the URL of your resolver, or if you have negotiated with another organization to carry on your work and take over your NAAN. If you transition into or out of a vendor relationship, there is no problem taking your NAAN with you.
NAANs subdivide the set of all possible ARKs (the ARK namespace). The subset of ARKs under a given NAAN can be further subdivided into shoulders (eg, 12345/x2, 98765/b4), which can make it easy to delegate autonomous ARK assignment to departments in a large organization. ARK resolution is loosely based on NAANs, but because organizations split, ARKs accommodate the namespace splitting problem by supporting management of a namespace by more than one organization.
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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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