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ARK (Archival Resource Key) identifiers are widely used for objects and abstractions related to scientific and scholarly heritage. ARKs were developed at the US National Library of Medicine and the California Digital Library (CDL) especially, but not exclusively, for the library, archive and museum community. Their built-in flexibility and ease-of-use has proven popular with researchers and scholars across all academic disciplines, as well as government, commercial and nonprofit sectors. Indeed, over 590 600 institutions across the world have registered to use ARKs, with usage conservatively estimated to number 3.2 billion assigned ARK identifiers.

CDL and DuraSpace/LYRASIS launched this pilot project as a first step toward ensuring the ongoing health and development of the ARK infrastructure. By “ARK infrastructure,” we mean open source software tools and systems, the ARK specification, and production-grade replicated resolver services for N2T.net (Name-to-Thing, a generic resolver for over 600 700 identifier types and also the global ARK resolver). ARKs represent the only mainstream persistent identifier scheme that is truly open, decentralized, non-siloed, and non-paywalled. Community ownership of this infrastructure has been under discussion since 2007, and the project made a start by establishing an active ARK community group with the aims of

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What we're working on now

Advisory Group

• Defining a governance model
• Applying for grants to develop open-source, replicated, next-generation resolver software

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