Assessing the practicality of ARK identifier usage in a catalogue of medieval manuscripts

In data management, the use of identifiers is essential for disambiguation and referencing. The scope of the use of identifiers varies. For example, disambiguation within an institution using integer identifiers may be sufficient for operational procedures, whereas digital scholarship using global resources relies on universally unique identifiers. In this paper we investigate practical routes to globally unique identifiers for the medieval manuscripts of the Bodleian Library. The Oxford Linked Open Data (OxLOD) and Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) projects require unique identifiers for the transformation of the medieval manuscripts catalogue into linked data, in an effort to increase discoverability and consistency across platforms. We consider how Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), a type of URI, can be applied to the Medieval Manuscript catalog as well as determining how ARKs can support MMM's research goals. We begin with examining the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) catalogue records to under-stand the data provided and identify and describe entities which do not presently have identifiers. Further, we evaluate ARKs for producing identifiers, prioritizing those which are required to answer common research questions.