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Community

The ARK Alliance community comprises institutions and people who use or assign ARK identifiers as well as those interested in promoting ARKs and sustaining the open ARK infrastructure, which consists of standards, best practices, the N2T.net resolver, and the registry of ARK organizations. There are also working groups (Outreach, Technical, NAAN Registry, Advisory) and an Archival Resource Key Community Code of Conduct.

Global distribution of over 1800 ARK organizations.

The ARK Alliance emerged from a collaboration between the California Digital Library and DuraSpace/LYRASIS. Launched in 2018, it has gained the support of 47 institutions listed further below. Since 2021 the ARK Alliance has been a member of the NDSA, an international consortium committed to the long-term preservation of digital information.

How to get involved

Join an ARK discussion forum
- in English
- en français 🇫🇷
- español/português
Follow the ARK Alliance on mastodon @arks_org@fosstodon.org
Follow us on Bluesky @arks_org.bsky.social
Read the ARK Alliance blog
Sign up for our newsletter
Submit a community news item or blog post using this online news form; you can use this story template to help create your content
Tell us about yourself by filling out a 5-minute ARK survey (in English) or 🇫🇷 une enquête ARK (version française)
Tell us about your interest in helping with the work of the ARK Alliance
Contact us about joining one of the working groups

Who is creating ARKs

Since 2001 over 1800 organizations across the world registered to assign ARKs. As of late 2025, the registry includes 13 national libraries, 215 universities, 254 archives, 144 museums, 124 journals, and 59 scientific centers, as well as many other organization types (government agencies, vendors, research labs, etc). To register your organization, fill out this online request form.

Growth of ARK-assigning organizations since 2001.

What ARKs are being assigned to (November 2025):

genealogical records (15 billion FamilySearch)
publisher content (157 million Portico)
scanned texts (50 million Internet Archive)
scientific records (22 million INIST)
bibliographic records (27 million BnF main catalog)
museum specimens (15 million going on 100 million Smithsonian)
public health documents, many from legal discovery (20 million UCSF IDL)
digitized documents and objects (36 million CDL, 6 million BnF Gallica)
historical persons, families, and organizations (4 million SNACC)
finding aids and special collections (4 million Merritt)
library and archival objects (1.3 million Durham University Library)
educational resources (1.1 million University of Utah)
fine art (490,000 Louvre museum)
historic maps (334,000 Princeton University Libraries)
vocabulary terms (30,000 Periodo, YAMZ)
datasets, journals, archeological artifacts, living beings, etc.

We continue to receive expressions of interest and have attracted support from the following 47 institutions on 4 continents:

Africa PID Alliance
Australian National Data Service
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg
The British Library
Caltech (California Institute of Technology)
City University of New York
Colectica
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas – Argentina
Crossref
DaSCH, Swiss National Data & Service Center for the Humanities
DeSci Labs
Editorial Mar Caribe
ENIP – Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit
Family Search International
HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Haute école de gestion de Genève
Indiana University
Institut Internationale de la Marionnette
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Internet Archive
Max Planck Institute for Art History – Bibliotheca Hertziana
National Center for Atmospheric Research
National University of Ireland, Galway
Penn State University
Portico
Sempiternelia
Service interministériel des Archives de France
Smithsonian Institution
South China Institute of Frontier Science
Texas A&M University Libraries
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
University College Dublin
University of Arizona
University of California, San Francisco
University of Chicago
University of Houston Libraries
University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Maryland
University of North Texas
University of Pennsylvania Libraries
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute
University of Utah
University of Virginia
West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN)
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste