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ARK Alliance

Home of the Archival Resource Key (ARK)

ARK Alliance Working Groups

The ARK Alliance (ARKA) has working groups (WGs) focussed on general topic areas. Anyone may request to join a working group by contacting one of its current members or writing to info@arks.org. The groups are introduced below.

Outreach Group

Purpose

The ARKA Outreach Working Group oversees development of the ARK Alliance community, as well as the promotion of awareness, understanding, and adoption of ARKs. The ARK Alliance Outreach wiki is for documents supporting both the ARK community and the ARKA Outreach WG.

Objectives

  1. Develop strategies for gathering requirements, priorities, and models for shared community and infrastructure management. Examples include ARK community survey draft created by the BnF, organizing events such as the 2018 ARK summit, spreading the word in international conferences, supporting the world map of ARK assigning organizations updated via geo-locations in the NAAN registry, etc.

  2. Clearly articulate what ARKs are, how they can be used, and why they are essential (the “value proposition”) and promote their adoption and use.

  3. Maintain and update the ARK Alliance documentation via the arks.org website, the n2t.net website, and support regional websites with ARK-related material.

  4. Support the ARK community by guiding, planning, and facilitating such things as regular open community calls (eg, via zoom), regional community calls, a chat platform (eg, Zulip, Slack), a calendar of events, and a list of ARKA-related email groups.

  5. Develop ways to characterize ARK usage, such as surveys or an API permitting ARK organizations to self-report via a harvestable API endpoint.

  6. Develop training materials and videos.

  7. Oversee the information used to support ARKA working groups (eg, wiki).

Deliverables

Resources

ARK Alliance Outreach Working Group Members

Technical Group

Purpose

The ARKA Technical Working Group oversees development and maintenance of specifications, software, and servers that support infrastructure for the ARK Alliance community. Examples include ARK standardization, code for counting ARKs, and global resolver replication. There is an ARK Alliance Technical Working Group wiki for its supporting documents.

Objectives

  1. Standardization. Update the ARK URI scheme registration with IETF and work with standards bodies (IETF, NISO, W3C, etc) to adopt the ARK spec.
  2. Design and review human- and machine-readable metadata formats to prescribe/recommend for implementers to respond to inflections such as ‘?info’.
  3. Global ARK resolution via N2A (the combined resolver n2t.net + arks.org). Guide the development and hosting of a replicated n2t.net-like resolution infrastructure.
  4. Measuring ARKs (e.g., counting ARKs). Work with the Outreach Working Group to implement mechanisms (eg, surveys, APIs) to measure ARK usage/impact world-wide.
  5. Support the Outreach WG in a liaison with the IIIF community (e.g., guidelines for ARK assignment).
  6. Evolve the ARK spec for new use cases and applications.
  7. As needed, analyze or recommend new infrastructure opportunities, such as a common minting service, public metadata store, shared secondary resolver, NAAN testing app, etc.
  8. As needed, look for and recruit expertise in supporting consultation (e.g., via zoom call, email, Zulip) that may arise from ARK community calls. This might involve regular review of unresolved issues
  9. As needed, look for and recruit expertise in supporting ARKs in popular software; for example, the ARK plugin that is failing for new versions of OJS and the delayed integration of ARKs into DSpace.
  10. Consider and/or recommend strategic new NAAN assignment possibilities given that modern ARK NAANs can be shorter or longer than 5 characters. For example, shorter “premium” NAANs might be offered in exchange for a donation, or new NAAN syntax rules could reserve optional suffix structure to support NAAs in common use cases such as development support (formerly supported by the old N2T) and replacing the confusing “shared NAAN” shoulder registration for terms, agents, and test ARKs.
  11. Determine how to define persistence statements.

Resources

  1. Current ARK spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kunze-ark/
  2. Current NAAN registry: https://n2t.net/e/pub/naan_registry.txt
  3. Global ARK (and other identifiers) resolver, N2T (Name-to-Thing): https://n2t.net
  4. Notes from ARK “Experts” meetings in 2018, with discussions of surveys, ARK spec changes, counting ARKs, sustainability, etc.
  5. General WG features common across ARKA working groups
  6. Persistence Statements: Describing Digital Stickiness: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-039

ARK Alliance Technical Working Group Members

NAAN Group

The ARKA NAAN Registry Working Group oversees the registry of institutions that have been given a Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN), with which they can begin assigning ARKs. The work consists of responding to requests for new NAANs and for changes to existing NAANs. Effectively the WG is a team of volunteer curators whose work will be ongoing. Although the WG is not expected ever to be finished, composition of the curatorial team is expected to evolve year to year. There is an ARK Alliance NAAN Working Group wiki for its supporting documents (this wiki is unfortunately not open due to PII concerns).

Objectives

  1. NAA maintenance. Create and refine processes that permit each NAAN request and Shoulder request to receive a response within two business days.
  2. Policy. In consultation with other working groups, develop guidelines for deciding which requests are appropriate for the ARK community.
  3. N2T resolution support. The NAAN Registry is harvested regularly to supply vital redirection information to the N2T resolver. Work with the Technical WG and the infrastructure host (CDL) to ensure stable, error-free harvesting of registry information needed for continuous and reliable resolution.

Deliverables

Resources

ARK Alliance NAAN Working Group Members

Advisory Group

The ARKA Advisory Group (AG) will provide a means for transitioning the ARK infrastructure (specification, NAAN registry, resolver) from the California Digital Library (CDL) to a community supported and managed activity. Planning is underway for an initial meeting of the group to review the goals, proposed timetable and roles drafted so far, as well as to launch working groups dedicated to pursuing objectives related to outreach, technical best practices, and sustainability. There is an ARK Alliance Advisory Working Group wiki for its supporting documents.

ARK Alliance Advisory Group members:

Guided by the Mozilla Foundation’s Open Leadership Framework, LYRASIS and CDL constituted this body by reaching out to those organizations that filled out our Expression of Interest form.

Community Leaders

The ARK Alliance Community Leaders are listed here.