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 only major persistent identifier scheme that is open, decentralized, non-siloed, and non-paywalled. There is an ARK Alliance Outreach Working Group wiki for its supporting documents.

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 website at arks.org and documentation at the n2t.net ARK resolver.
  4. Support the calendar of events and 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 (currently Confluence 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. Work with standards bodies (IETF, NISO, W3C, etc) to adopt the ARK spec.
  2. Design and review ‘?info’ inflection for returning human- and machine-readable metadata.
  3. Global ARK resolver. Guide the development and hosting of the N2T.net resolver.
  4. Counting ARKs. Work with the Outreach Working Group to implement mechanisms (eg, surveys, APIs) to measure ARK usage world-wide.
  5. Support the Outreach WG in a liaison with the IIIF community.
  6. Work with standards bodies (IETF, NISO, W3C, etc) to adopt the ARK spec.

Deliverables

Resources

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 mostly of responding to requests for new NAANs, but also to requests 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 the Advisory Group, develop policies 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 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.