ARK Timeline

2001 John Kunze publishes the first ARK specification and the NAAN registry

2004 John makes the first public ARK resolver (noid.cdlib.org) available on the Internet and shares the code base

2006 ARK resolver renamed N2T.net per a vision of community ownership, starts redirecting identifiers based on incoming ARK NAANs or compact identifier prefixes

2009 CDL helps found DataCite to promote the use of DOIs

2010 CDL releases EZID as a fee-based, partial cost-recovery service supporting both ARKS & DataCite DOIs; EZID and Internet Archive store individual ARK records in N2T

2010-2016 CDL (Joan Starr) grows the EZID service to 120 clients globally with a goal to achieve full cost-recovery

2015 Blog post on principles of open scholarly infrastructure (Bilder, Lin, Neylon) re-affirms community vision

2016 DataCite announces intention to change their fee structure and introduce service fees to EZID based on volume of activity; to not compete with DataCite, EZID stops accepting new customers outside the University of California

2017 CDL approaches DuraSpace to consider the viability of an open-source project/community for ARKs

2018 The ARKsInTheOpen.org project launches

2021 Community rebranded as the ARK Alliance (ARKA) and website converted from WordPress to run on GitHub Pages

2024 To anticipate easy resolver replication, N2T stops storing individual ARKs and redirects based only on NAAN or registered (shared) shoulder; with no service disruption, N2T is still estimated to resolve 25% of ARKs globally