Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
ark:/12148/btv1b8449691v (a manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France).
- Is an instance
ark:/13030/kt9c6035s2 (a California Digital Library object).
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A DOI such as 10.1038/nature14539 is not an ARK.
- Not an instance
A relative URL on a museum website is not an ARK.
Editorial commentary
ARK (Archival Resource Key) is a persistent identifier scheme designed by John Kunze at the California Digital Library in 2001 to provide low-cost, distributed identifiers for information objects without relying on a central commercial registry. An ARK has the form ark:/NAAN/Name[Qualifier], where the NAAN (Name Assigning Authority Number) identifies the issuing organisation and Name is that organisation’s own local identifier.
What makes ARK’s governance model distinctive
Unlike DOI, where minting runs through a paid registration agency (Crossref, DataCite), a NAAN can be requested directly from the ARK Alliance at no registration fee, and the requesting organisation then runs its own resolver — a deliberately distributed authority model rather than a centralised one. This is part of why ARKs have been adopted at scale by libraries, archives, and government agencies with long-term preservation mandates but limited budgets, notably the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Internet Archive, alongside the California Digital Library itself. The scheme remains formally specified as an IETF Internet-Draft rather than a ratified RFC, though it has gone through multiple revisions and is treated as stable by its adopter community.
ARK’s distinguishing technical feature
ARK’s structural openness — permitting qualifiers appended to a base Name to address sub-parts or variants of an object without minting a new identifier for each — is paired with an inflection convention, where appending ‘?’ or ‘??’ to an ARK’s resolvable URL returns metadata or a persistence-policy statement instead of the object itself. That mechanism, its exact semantics, and its limits (it is a resolver convention, not something enforced by ARK syntax itself) are covered in full in ARK inflection rules rather than repeated here.
References
- Kunze J., Rodgers R., ‘The ARK Identifier Scheme’, IETF Internet-Draft (multiple versions).
- ARK Alliance (arks.org).
Also known as
Archival Resource Key
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="ARK"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ark" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ark",
"name": "ARK",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ark",
"description": "Archival Resource Key, a persistent identifier scheme for information objects of any type, in the form ark:/NAAN/Name[Qualifier], where NAAN is a Name Assigning Authority Number and Name is the local identifier; resolvable through any cooperating ARK resolver.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ark",
"sameAs": [
"Archival Resource Key"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:10:23",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T19:51:39",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
