ARKs for "common people"

[Gabriela Queiroz]

Hi,

Are there any services or projects to bring ARKs to "commoners" (i.e. people who are neither scholars nor workers of large institutions)?

I know EZID already exists but they seem to be too focused on the scholarly market and their prices are unaffordable for many people.

The use case I'm considering is that of people within marginalized groups (queer, neurodivergent, disabled, patients of specific diseases, small ethnicities, etc.) who often produce media about their situation (be it blog posts, pamphlets, talks/lectures, guides, etc.). Such media is often lost as URLs aren't that permanent and they are usually hard to cite as the titles aren't such media doesn't always have clear titles and/or authors.

Using UUIDs or ULIDs are kinda of an option for these people but there's no good way to resolve them.

PS: if you know about something for this use case from other permanent identifier schemes, please send me a message.

[Greg Janée]

Gabriela, PURLs (purl.org) may be an option for one-off persistent identifiers (persistent URLs in this case). It's now run by the Internet Archive and is open to anybody. -Greg

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ARKs group. To post to this group, send email to arks-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/arks-forum?hl=en
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ARKs" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/119f025f-8434-44f5-9591-6671f9ce16b9n%40googlegroups.com.

[ARKs]

Hi Gabriela,

The biggest problem with this kind of content is, in my view, the fact that the content itself might disappear, in which case a persistent identifier would not help at all. It would either send the user to a 404 Not found (which is quite the opposite of what a persistent identifier should do) or it would point to a “tombstone” page, if managed properly. My suggestion would be to think about the content first and save it into a web archive. Either into an institutional or national library web archive, or using Internet Archive’s Save Page now service. People could then use these URLs for citation (which should be best practice anyway for any web content) or, if desired (and possible) link persistent identifiers to these URLs.

As a side note, the Internet Archive is probably the biggest user of ARKs (or is it maybe Portico?), but, as far as I know, they only use them internally. At least for the time being…

Kind regards,

Roxana Maurer

On Friday, October 14, 2022 at 6:22:05 AM UTC+2 Greg Janée wrote:

Gabriela, PURLs (purl.org) may be an option for one-off persistent identifiers (persistent URLs in this case). It's now run by the Internet Archive and is open to anybody. -Greg

[Greg Janée]

That's an excellent point, Roxana. Little point in considering a PID without addressing the preservation of the object itself. -Greg

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ARKs group. To post to this group, send email to arks-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/arks-forum?hl=en
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ARKs" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/53f9c61a-1f5a-4ff1-91a0-ac5791b48339n%40googlegroups.com.

[Jefferson Bailey]

Hi,

I can chime in from Internet Archive. While yes, we do now run the PURL service, we also run an ARK minting/resolving service. Roxana is correct that in the past we have run this internally for any texts archived in IA. This includes works we digitize but also any texts deposited by institutions or users. So if you have texts (scans, PDFs, .docs/txt, etc) it will be assigned an ARK upon deposit. This would be an easy way to deposit something both for long-term preservation and to get an ARK (of course you also get a persistent, human-readable archive.org URL too, fwiw).

Here is an example of a scan: https://ark.archive.org/ark:/13960/s2xzqf4nmjk

Here is an example of a user deposit: http://ark.archive.org/ark:/13960/s2h0p29khzm

In the past we partnered with CDL using their ARK infrastructure, but earlier this year we migrated the service internally and, as part of that, we wrote our own open-source ARK application (if this is of interest to other readers): https://github.com/internetarchive/arklet.

We are currently exploring 1) how to provide this service to mission-aligned organizations and individuals including for content outside of IA (either for free or for some trivial cost that avoids the membership fees many PID services require); and 2) how to best apply ARKs to non-text content in IA (especially web and a/v material) including content we steward on behalf of our institutional and individual partners and users.

So Gabriela, we are interested in your use case, so if you want to email me separately, we can discuss. Also happy to chat with any other list members interested in the above.

Cheers,

Jefferson

Jefferson Bailey
Director, Archiving & Data Services
Internet Archive
jeff...@archive.org

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/C32E807B-73B0-4BFA-BE78-98EDB7084168%40ucsb.edu.

[Agnes Cameron]

It might be a little different to what you’re asking about, but PubPub is a really great tool for publishing and archiving knowledge that would normally not make it into academic journals. It’s a free and open-access online journal publishing platform that allows communities to issue DOIs for things published on the platform via their Crossref registration (I think there might be a limit to the number of free DOIs per year). They also have cool features like open peer review.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/C32E807B-73B0-4BFA-BE78-98EDB7084168%40ucsb.edu.

[Gabriela Queiroz]

Thanks

Gabriel Queiroz

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "ARKs" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/arks-forum/qmJOKjuys4k/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/A585A4CF-54C4-4F1D-9594-222B37B87FBF%40ucsb.edu.

[Gabriela Queiroz]

I agree with you both. However, even preserving just the metadata is already an improvement over the current situation.

Additionally, I was thinking about how much just having a stable identifier would help distributed archiving initiatives.

Perhaps one might mint ARKs that point to IPFS files but that sounds too "crazy cryptotech" for what ARK want to be.

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "ARKs" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/arks-forum/qmJOKjuys4k/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/C32E807B-73B0-4BFA-BE78-98EDB7084168%40ucsb.edu.

[Gabriela Queiroz]

> It might be a little different to what you’re asking about, but PubPub

 is a really great tool for publishing and archiving knowledge that would normally not make it into academic journals. It’s a free and open-access online journal publishing platform that allows communities to issue DOIs for things published on the platform via their Crossref registration (I think there might be a limit to the number of free DOIs per year). They also have cool features like open peer review.

That sounds amazing. Thanks!

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "ARKs" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/arks-forum/qmJOKjuys4k/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to arks-forum+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/34F9DF91-46E7-4845-902B-2372658BA971%40gmail.com.

[Donny Winston]

> Such media is often lost as URLs aren't that permanent and they are usually hard to cite as the titles aren't such media doesn't always have clear titles and/or authors.

> PS: if you know about something for this use case from other permanent identifier schemes, please send me a message.

Related: some DOI registration entities implement content negotiation in order to serve citations, both as formatted text (text/x-bibliography) and in common formats for import into citation software (e.g. application/x-bibtex et al.): <https://citation.crosscite.org/docs.html#sec-4>.

One approach I could see working for this use case is for a service provider to act as a lightweight ARK NMA (name mapping authority) that binds independently minted ARKs to both (a) citation metadata made accessible via content negotation, and (b) (archive.org) target URLs. I don't know of any that do this currently.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/arks-forum/CAKZ7jyRxRZzHq%2BTxqC2wOrRLJF0wZYgErAoD_ZZrG_88ZbCKXA%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Donny Winston, PhD (he/him/his)

Polyneme LLC

New York, NY

https://polyneme.xyz

If I've emailed you, I'd love to speak with you.

Schedule a quick chat:

https://meet.polyneme.xyz/10-min-chat